by Maya Kumar
[box]Teachers at a daycare or a preschool are the real stars, says Maya Kumar. Handling children at an impressionable age and meeting parental expectations in terms of love and care for the kids are only some of the many important tasks they do. Here’s a small tribute to the real stars from the little world. [/box]Presumptuous as it might sound, until a couple of years back – before I had my first baby, I had always believed that I would make a great teacher and that I had a way with children. It’d been my secret desire to retire early from software and invest in an initiative that would foster a creative learning environment for children in their early years. One year into motherhood and now what I have is awe and an increased sense of respect for everyone in the teaching profession, especially for the teachers who work at daycares, preschools and kindergartens.
Motherhood is the most fulfilling experience for a woman, but at the same time, can be daunting, exhausting and many times even frustrating. I have felt moments of immense joy when my daughter uttered her first babyish babbles, took her first wobbly steps or called me “amma” for the first time and I can say I would give up anything to have that experience again.
But amidst all these, I have also felt the exhaustion of continually having to care for her, keeping track of each of her footsteps, making sure she is within my line of sight lest she hurts herself. Add to that, the frustration of endlessly instructing her not to do something, only to find that it motivates her to overdo the same thing. And I’ve felt all these emotions managing just one child.
Imagine a daycare or a preschool where one teacher looks after a few infants, toddlers or preschoolers or in a country like ours, a group of 35 to 40 kindergarteners. We are essentially talking about children between 0 and 5 years of age.
It’s not simply about keeping a watch on them, but each teacher trying to live up to the expectation of parents to give the kids the same love, care and learning that we as parents give our own children. I would be intimidated by the immensity of that task, but the existence of such places that flourish and play the most important roles in shaping a child’s foundational years, much to the satisfaction of parents, is indeed a boon for working moms.
What makes these teachers’ tasks more challenging than those in middle school or high school pedagogy? Yes, a very obvious and true statement is the care and constant attention the children require in these early years – the age of innocence, unabated enthusiasm and curiosity and dangerous mischief. Having gone on a few daycare tours when trying to find one for my daughter, I found this could mean much more than that, for, this is not only the time children pick up their first words or make their first friends or learn to use the potty. Of course, those are undoubtedly some of the important landmarks in a child’s life, but this is also the age when they learn the most, when their curiosity is at the highest end of their learning curve, when everything from an inanimate pen to a flying plane stimulates their thinking and when their internalizing capacities are probably at their most efficient levels. Not to mention the need to carefully keep track of their hunger and sleep timings, because missing or even delaying either of these could result in extreme bouts of crying and irritability for the child. After all, this is an age where their ability to express their needs is highly limited. To be able to cater to their demands of unending physical and mental activity and attention while carefully maintaining the balance between inactivity and over-stimulation requires deep creativity in choosing and designing the perfect activities, good insight into the functioning of a child’s brain to accordingly determine a general nap and food schedule, ability to make the right judgments and customize these aspects based on their individual needs and beyond anything, the desire to take care of children, to give unconditional love to children that are not your own.
Over and above the needs that I talked about, this is also the age when the child develops a sense of the “I”, the personality that she or he would develop in the coming years, and when they start feeling the need for a social life as well. What comes with it is the desire to connect with children of their age, quite paradoxically though with a strong sense of possessiveness and unwillingness to share what they consider their “own” (or “mine…” in their words!) Cultivating a personality of optimism, confidence and respect for fellow humans needs a lot of patience and a very positive approach to disciplining children and teaching them to tell right from the wrong. A very interesting way of disciplining children that I came to know from the director of a daycare that I visited is to tell children the reason why they must not do something or the consequences of their act, rather than being prescriptive about what they can or cannot do. It took me to hear that from someone to realise that until then I had been doing it the typical prescriptive way!
Parents no longer consider daycares or preschools places of simple child care. The expectation is that these places would emulate the home environment for them, would nurture love and confidence in these children and lay the foundation for a competitive world that waits outside for them. Much to the joy and comfort of parents, there is more general awareness and willingness on the part of such places to provide their children with a quality learning and caring experience, with an open feedback system to address parents’ concerns.
Ironically though, for all the efforts that these teachers invest into our children, their profession continues to remain among the lower paid and sometimes even less respected in the professional fields. But, for any mother who knows what it is to leave her child with someone for 10 hours in a day and see her smiling and beaming at the end of the day, these unrecognized teachers are the real stars of their world, the stars that shine on their little ones, light up the roads and hold their hands as they slowly trot towards the next station in their journey of life.
Pic : loresui – http://www.flickr.com/photos/loresui/
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