Work and Workings of a Nerd

This week was the first opportunity I had to work closely with Peckie, my liaison teacher, as we both supervised the patio area. This situation was helpful in gaining insight into the design of the activities, the background of individual children, techniques for interacting with children, and other perspectives on observed behavior.

Peckie pointed out that the workbench area was unique to our classroom in being a regular activity. When I first came to the classroom, I was surprised that it was there since it seems like a particularly dangerous activity. Helping several children make things, however, I was surprised how deliberate their work was. For all of them, they looked to me to hold nails with pliers. I’m not certain where this behavior comes from: it’s possible that the teachers have, until then, always watched closely and insisted that the children have a teacher help them. A more generous possibility is that the children are aware of their own motor control limitations and can’t go forward without it. In either case, the workbench doesn’t seem like the right place to necessarily push them to become more independent.

Woodworking as an activity has several qualities that make it similar to other activities in the classroom but unique as well. Like blockbuilding, woodworking is the composition of bigger things from basic shapes, though the purpose seems to be somewhat different. A strength of blockbuilding is that it provides “…an excellent open-ended medium for communicating and playing out their ideas for developing cognitively, socially, emotionally, and physically” (130). Although I haven’t yet been able to interact with children playing with blocks, the readings suggest that the play aspect is central to blockbuilding: the blocks become symbols for other objects, and children can engage with others around these manifestations of their imagination. Woodworking, however, seems to be a largely solitary activity (except for the assistance from teachers), and the real education comes from learning how to use the medium. That quality seems closer to playing with clay, where the manipulation of the material is the main limit instead of imagination. When I was helping one of the boys put together a box, he clearly knew what he wanted but had difficulty getting there. First, the nail split the wood we were working with. He quickly realized he could use another piece to connect the wood instead, though hammering those pieces together without support was more difficult. Throughout this work, I remained relatively passive, helping him when he needed another pair of hands but otherwise allowing him to explore the properties of the materials and develop solutions on his own. I was surprised at his persistence in not being dissuaded by the failures and difficulties.

Another activity on the patio was at a table with trays of water and vials. A particularly interesting situation Peckie setup involved packing peanuts. Earlier in the week, the children had discovered that one type of peanuts dissolved in the water. That day, those were available in one bowl, and in another bowl were peanuts that didn’t dissolve in water. A. came to the table first and knew that the Styrofoam was supposed to “melt” and pointed this out to me. He took several pieces from the bowl with non-dissolving peanuts, placed them into vials with water, and jammed them to the bottom. Over time, he seemed to notice that they weren’t dissolving and used tongs to continue to jam the peanuts further into the bottom of the vials. When I asked him, he confirmed that the peanuts were melting, but he was clearly dismayed that it wasn’t happening. Although his behavior seems paradoxical, it really isn’t so surprising that he could maintain a belief clearly inconsistent with reality; that mistake doesn’t disappear with maturity. In this case, however, it strikes me as inflexibility in his representation of possible objects. To me, it seems obvious that the different packing peanuts were different, but to A., all of them were the same and had the same properties.

O. (I think) came to the table next, and she reached for the peanuts that melted first. She mentions how much she likes to get the peanuts “soft” and dissolves around 10 of them in vials by submerging the peanuts and shaking it up. She then does this to a few in her tray, which has accumulated some amount of water. At this point, I reach for the other packing peanut, give it to her, and ask her if it will melt as well. She drops it into her tray where it stays intact. She first dumps a lot more water into the tray, then tries to place a piece of partially dissolved Styrofoam into it, which I thought was amazingly creative and am still impressed at. Finally, she breaks it into smaller pieces, which she seems satisfied with.

Clearly, O. was more creative and persistent in trying to make the Styrofoam melt; I’m uncertain, however, whether she truly had a better understanding of the peanuts than A. did. O. seemed to resolve her problem by breaking it into smaller pieces, which is qualitatively different but does reduce the peanuts to some degree. I regret not discussing with her more directly whether she understood the difference between the peanuts. Her choice of multiple interventions suggests that she knew that there was some difference in the process: placing dissolved Styrofoam in the other specifically seems like a way of inducing properties in one object from another. However, her ultimate belief and goal to dissolve the peanut remained the same, and I’m uncertain whether her resolution of breaking up the peanut physically was truly sastifying to her.

For most of my time during this past session, I was in the language area, either helping children with stories or watching them set puzzles. Although several children came through, there seemed to be a few children who primarily stayed in this area and that most of my attention was fixed on.

N. came in first and sat down next to me, drawing a picture. I didn’t think much of it at first, but her father came to me and told me that N. liked having me in the classroom. Although I was glad to have made that connection with her, I also felt like I needed to be careful. In our reading, Griffith points out that “[A teacher] makes no effort to charm or involve the children through becoming the center of their attention, though she is always ready to help when needed” (61). I wanted to make sure that I was being fair to all students as well as maintaining my relationship as a teacher to them. With multiple students at the table, I tried to attend to all of them equally, though N. was particularly interested in interacting with me as well, such as perching an eagle puppet on my shoulder, and it was clear that she was there not to play with the items in the language area but to play with me. I’m interested to see how this progresses going forward: my hope is that my presence won’t be too much of a distraction for her, and she eventually did end up leaving and playing with other children outside. If she does insist on playing more specifically with me, however, I do think I will need to talk seriously with her in that I am not really a permanent playmate for her.

A. was also there, and I felt as though much of her interaction with me and the other students was fighting for attention. When O. started drawing a rainbow, A. started drawing a rainbow, and when O. had me write stories for her, A. also wanted me to write stories for her. When another student made some comment, such as having a certain toy, A. would “one-up” the other student, perhaps saying that she herself had the same toy. Uncertain about what her motivation for this behavior was, I didn’t deal with it directly, but tried to spin it in a more positive direction. Instead of praising one student or another, I would say something to A. like, “That’s a coincidence that you both have the same toy.” In that way, I was hoping to draw more similarities between them, instead of emphasizing the difference, and have them connect on the issue instead. I did have some difficulty giving A. even proper attention however: because her requests always came slightly after another (being a copy), and since her patience was typically shorter than the required activity, I had little opportunity to directly interact with her. Should this happen again, I think I might try to deal more directly with A. in a way that doesn’t reward her behavior but also giver her a better feeling that I am treating her equally.

After snack time, I drifted outside and over to the sand area where two girls were stirring a large tub of water and sand. When I first asked them what it was, they told me that it was a potion, though when I repeated this back to them, they insisted that it was actually an ocean. As they sprinkled more “cinnamon” into the tub, it soon turned into an “ocean of cinnamon,” which both Nandini and I expressed our surprise about. While I was watching and talking to them, they also whispered to each other, and soon they explained that it was going to be a secret. Presuming that they intended that it being an ocean of cinnamon, I asked them, “What will you say if someone asks you what it is?” One of them responded that they would tell the asker what it was. When I pointed out that it wasn’t a very good secret if they told everyone, they then insisted there was a deeper. I didn’t press them for what that secret was, but we talked more at length about the nature of secrets and who we can share them with. Soon, one of them asked me if I wanted to know what the secret was (under the condition of secrecy, of course), and when I agreed, they told me it was a potion. When I asked what the potion did, they initially had no answer, then came up with something on the spot.

The biggest surprise in this conversation was the maze-like, improvised nature of their story. We discussed in class last week that children often do things without a goal, and it seems that they also similarly engage in fiction without fleshing out what seems to me to be essential details. As I went through the conversation with them, they were making up new aspects of their play. Instead of admitting to any contradictions in their story, they developed even more elaborate details to reconcile pieces together.

The deeper issue that caused them trouble in play was their ability for deception, which I find very interesting. In a cognitive development class, we discussed the difficulty that children have with deception and linked this to issues of theory of mind. My experience at Bing has shown that this isn’t strictly true since they are capable of deception, and they’re quite proficient in the ostensibly linked task of understanding and creating fiction. Even so, the girls were unable to both intend to keep a secret (in wanting to tell others what their concoction was) and actually keep the secret (asking me if I wanted to know instead of waiting for me to ask them). Pointing out these problems with secrecy motivated them to create even deeper secrets, which they were presumably guarding.

(This quarter, I’m taking Psych147, Development in Early Childhood. The main part of the class is spending some time every week at Bing Nursery School playing with children. As part of the class, we write journal entries every week about our experiences, and given the haphazard form of them, they seem perfectly appropriate for this blog. Names are of course knocked out, but hopefully you can follow. I’ll try to catch up till now over the next few days as we’re already 4 weeks in.)

Within psychology, I’m particularly interested in cognition and how people are capable of making inductive leaps. Although adults’ abilities are impressive, I find children’s to be more interesting. Through their development, children are simultaneously very good and very bad at cognitive tasks, often on tasks with ostensibly similar demands. I took this course hoping to understand what the characteristics of children’s cognitive development are and how learning occurs and is encouraged in schools.

Within a single session, I couldn’t really see the trajectory of development for the children, but I was generally impressed by how curious and perceptive they were. At the beginning of class, J. was playing with the hen and eggs, and he asked me, “Are there chickens inside these eggs?” I was initially uncertain about how to answer his question because I was uncertain about what the correct answer was. I was uncertain about whether I could communicate the full truth (that no, these plastic eggs don’t have chickens, but the eggs they represent would) in a way that he would understand, especially the distinction between the actual nature of the object versus its fictional, symbolic intent. I told him that no, the eggs were made of plastic, and he seemed satisfied with that response. I later heard twice the eggs referred to as plastic, and although I can’t verify that children transmitted the knowledge from my statement between each other, it’s certainly possible that they did this on their own.

In retrospect, the nature of the question should have revealed what exactly he knew and understood. First, his question clearly indicates that he knew that typical eggs do have chickens inside of them. More significantly, however, he was also aware of the fact that these eggs were somehow not of the normal variety and didn’t have the same internal characteristics. Even if the symbolic nature of the eggs was lost on him, it seems more clear to me now that he understood enough distinctions to follow any of my likely responses. Understanding and being capable of functioning within these fictional worlds seems to be critical at Bing. The “About Bing” handout states that “PLAY… provides the medium through which the children may imitate, explore, test ideas, acquire information, and draw conclusions” (1). J. certainly used this opportunity to acquire information from an adult (me) who should understand what his thought process was through his play.

Considering my own childhood, I was certainly capable of understanding play and fiction. In pre-kindergarten, my favorite activity was playing at the workbench area where various plastic tools were available. A large part of my fondness for it was that the station was only big enough for 2 people, and I could play at it with just my best friend Michael. We were certainly not capable of creating anything real at the workbench, simply swinging around toy hammers and pushing around other pieces. Although it was intended to imitate some sort of work area, I was certainly aware that I wasn’t using a real hammer and that it didn’t have the same characteristics and capabilities of a real one.

At some point during my session in the classroom, I met O. and followed her through several different activities, including crafts, the swing, and almost looking at worms. I was immediately struck by how quickly she seemed to attach herself and bring me through her activities, grabbing my hand when she was done with the first and pulling me outside. At first, I was uncertain about doing this as my role hadn’t been fully fleshed out. Until then, I had witnessed the other teachers primarily supervising the children. Although they interacted with the individual children, they were also responsible for particular areas of the room and needed to have a broad sense of what was happening in the entire classroom. Following around a single student might be contrary to typical behavior of adults in the classroom, but I also saw it as an opportunity to bond with her individually. As I followed her around, I primarily remained patient, responsive, and interactive, but also more passive in following, not leading. In effect, I was her playmate for a short while. She seemed to like the attention I was giving her and the chance to demonstrate what she knew, such as “pumping” on the swings. When we went out to find worms, however, she found other children to play with, and after coming to a decision on that, she ran off with them, and I thought it best to let her go.

Bing seems to offer a very different experience than I had in pre-kindergarten. Bing seems designed to have a very open design for unstructured play, which naturally requires more teachers to supervise children in whatever activities they chose. My own experience was that pre-kindergarten was highly structured, with a schedule, set areas, and control over the movement of students. The flipside is that we had little more supervision than a single teacher with maybe one assistant since we were often engaged in something specific.

Overall, I had a great experience during my first week. The time went by very quickly, and I found that there wasn’t much downtime overall. The children were genuinely open to my presence, and I was comfortable interacting with them because they came so willingly to interact with me. Although I was uncertain about what role I should have in their classroom experience, I was mostly comfortable engaging them in their various activities and having them think critically about their actions.