The First Question This Teacher Asks Her
Kindergarteners Every Morning
BY ALICE GOMSTYN
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About a decade ago, I stood in a high school English
classroom, trying my best to give an exciting speech about my experiences
as a young reporter. I worked for the local newspaper at the time and the
school had invited me and a photographer to give the students a sense of the
career opportunities available to them.
The teens all sat politely, if not quite rapt … except
for one. He was a short, scrawny kid in an oversized hoodie. I could see him
fidget and, worse, heard him mutter the occasional complaint about my
presentation. Finally, he seemed to surrender to the fact that yes, I would be
there for at least a few more minutes but instead of perking his ears up to
listen, he lay his head down on his desk.
His teacher approached him and I expected some form of
discipline would ensue. Instead, she gently put her arm around him and said
something in a soft voice. I couldn’t make out exactly what it was, but it was
clear she wasn’t scolding him — just showing some TLC. I felt mildly annoyed,
to say the least. A child was acting rudely during my talk and there’d be no
consequence for it?
It only hit me later that the student’s behaviour
likely had little to do with me. The school served mostly poor students, more
than half of whom qualified for free or reduced-cost lunches. The odds were
good that this kid faced dire straits outside school hours. Maybe he was
cranky because he had skipped a meal or two. Maybe he was tired because he
didn’t have a comfortable place to sleep. Maybe he didn’t have a home at all.
Whatever his problems were, his teacher saw fit to offer him compassion instead
of punishment.
I thought about them both as I read a recent story in The Washington Post reporting
that more than half of U.S. public school students live in poverty. The
statistic itself is shocking, but what moved me even more was an anecdote about
a kindergarten teacher in Albuquerque. Sonya Romero-Smith shows her young
students some TLC, too, in part by stocking a drawer
full of clean kids’ socks, underwear, and pants for the children.
“When they first come in my door in the morning, the
first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you
clean?” she told The Post.
My older son is nearly kindergarten age and he’s never
short on food or clean clothing. No one should be, but especially not children
that small, that vulnerable. It breaks my heart to imagine the circumstances
Romero-Smith’s students leave behind when they reach her door.
I wanted to know more about life inside and outside of
Romero-Smith’s classroom, so I emailed her with questions both specific and
broad. I asked her, for starters, why it was that kids came to school dirty.
(Answer: It can be difficult to access bathroom and cleaning facilities in
crowded homeless shelters and motels.) I asked why students were arriving
hungry when there are government resources like food stamps available. (Answer:
Food stamp allotments don’t stretch that far and, as others have noted, the cheapest
foods are often the most processed and least nutritious.)
If my questions sound naive, it’s largely because I
live in a comfortably upper-middle class bubble. In my community, the loudest
school-related gripes I hear are about standardized testing or athletics.
Outside of scattered charity efforts, it can be easy for a parent in my neighbourhood
to forget that so many school children have far more pressing concerns than
whether the local football field is in tip-top shape.
Romero-Smith’s toughest day, she said, came when
authorities removed a malnourished child from her classroom after it was
discovered that one of his parents had overdosed on drugs.
“Having a 5-year-old beg not to be taken away by police
was devastating. I remember I gave this child the only thing I could find which
was a stuffed toy that I had in the class,” she said. “I told this child that I
would make sure he was OK and that all I wanted him to do was love and care for
this stuffed toy.”
It was Romero-Smith’s desperate, last-ditch effort to
comfort the traumatized boy … and, amazingly, it seemed to work.
“Several weeks later, his foster parent brought him
back to our school and he returned that stuffed toy and said he never let the
toy ‘be lonely,'” she told me. “It was truly humbling.”
It’s mind-boggling to imagine the painful worries
weighing on the minds of teachers like Romero-Smith and others. Not only must
they focus on providing an education to their students, they must jump hurdle
after hurdle to get their young charges to a place where they’re capable of
learning at all.
“Our job, as teachers, is to ensure emotional and
social well-being as well as academics,” she told me.
Romero-Smith has a busy schedule. In addition to the
demands of her teaching job, she’s also a foster mother to two young sisters —
students from her school who were recently homeless. But she took time to
answer my questions because she said she wanted to help “give a voice to the
voiceless” — other impoverished children who are at risk of never breaking the
cycle of poverty.
“Their stories need to shared to provoke action and
change but also to show the realities that can be difficult to understand,” she
said.
In the meantime, Romero-Smith keeps plugging away in
her classroom, remaining optimistic and encouraging her students.
“I keep going because I know they matter,” she said.
“Every one of them is full of greatness.”
I’ll never know what happened to the fidgety kid who
nearly snored his way through my talk some ten years ago. But I’m glad that
soft-spoken teacher showed him compassion. Maybe she saw greatness in him, too.
I hope, despite the odds, that he achieved it.
Finally here is an idea for teachers.
