As a newly retired teacher, my heartfelt dream is to travel and visit kindergarten classrooms around the world-- New Zealand, Japan, Germany, Alaska (my favorite country of all), Botswana, Georgia (in the region of the Caucasus Mountains), Iceland, Finland, and on and on.  

I started teaching kindergarten in Teller, near Nome, Alaska in the fall of 1996.  I was an enthusiastic and very inexperienced teacher at that point in my life, as well as being a mother of a toddler.  There was so much to learn from my Inupiat kindergarten students and paraprofessional teachers during my 5 years in Teller.  In the fall of 2004,  I left the far north to work with home school students (preK to high school) in the Prince William Sound area.   After 5 years as an advisory teacher to home school families, I re-entered the classroom in Valdez.  Initially, I worked as a paraprofessional, then I stepped into the role of "Gifted and Talented" teacher for 2 and a half years.  Eventually, in the fall of 2013, I was hired as one of the three kindergarten teachers in Valdez.  I enjoyed the creative and wildly energetic nature of my kindergarten students for the next 8 years, until I retired in the spring of 2021.  Combined with my five years in the kindergarten (and PreK) in Teller, I devoted 13 years to my young students.  

I can't recall when I first read the book Teacher by Sylvia Aston-Warner.  In 2013, I wrote briefly about this unique book in this "brain care" essay.   In that essay, I wrote...

"One of the first books that changed my outlook on literacy and culturally appropriate teaching is Teacher by Sylvia Ashton-Warner.  In the 1950's, the author taught in Maori schools using revolutionary techniques that based literacy lessons on the children's authentic stories.  When I worked in the Alaska Native village of Teller with kindergarten students, I helped the students to make their own books in which they illustrated and dictated short stories about Inupiaq cultural values such as "love of family" and "hunter success."  In this way, students were strengthening these personal memories at the same time that they were working on transferring literacy skills into long-term memory."

I recently re-read Teacher, after recommending it to a fellow teacher.  My summary above is incorrect...Sylvia Ashton-Warner began teaching Maori students in 1932 and she published this book in 1963.  It was inspiring to learn that, at age 61, she pursued a path of learning and teaching that is similar to the journey that I wish to take.  For 10 years, Sylvia studied and taught in India, Israel, England, the U.S. and Canada, then returned to New Zealand.  In 1979, she published her autobiography, I Passed This Way.  This book is on its way to my mailbox, and I plan to write another post after reading it.

Sylvia Ashton-Warner was born in 1908, 114 years ago.  She started teaching 90 years ago, when my grandmother, who is still lively and humorous at age 99, was in the 4th grade.    Our world was so different 9 decades ago, and her experiences in rural Maori villages were very different than my experiences in rural Inupiaq villages, yet her observations about young children and their creativity are applicable to all classrooms.  

She explained, in her exuberant style, "I like unpredictability and variation; I like drama and I like gaiety; I like peace in the world and I like interesting people, and all this means that I like life in its organic shape and that's just what you get in an infant room where the creative vent widens.  For this is where style is born in both writing and art, for art is the way you do a thing and an education based on art at once flashes out style."   "On the five-year-old level the mind is not yet patterned and it is an exciting thought.  True, I often get the over-disciplined European five, crushed beyond recognition as an identity, by respectable parents, but never Maoris; as a rule a five-year-old child is not boring.  In an infant room it is still possible to meet an interesting, unpatterned person." (these quotes can be found on pages 98 and 99 of the 1986 edition of Teacher)

I found many areas of overlap between her ideal classroom and my own ideal place for learning.  On page 94, she explains that she tries to "bring as many facets of teaching into the creative vent as possible, with emphasis on reading and writing.  And that's just what organic teaching is; all subjects in the creative vent.  It's just as easy for a teacher, who gives a child a brush and lets him paint, to give him a pencil and let him write, and to let him pass his story to the next one to read.  Simplicity is so safe.  There's no occasion whatever for the early imposition of a dead reading, a dead vocabulary.  I'm so afraid of it.  It's like a frame over a young tree making it grow in an unnatural shape.  It makes me think of that curtailment of a child's expansion of which Erich Fromm speaks, of that unlived life of which destructiveness is the outcome."  If I imagine walking into her classroom, this is what I envision seeing, based on her detailed and sometimes self-deprecating descriptions in Teacher:

• joyful children in motion, dancing around, chattering with each other and sharing their work
• the combined sounds of conversation, blocks falling, piano music, frustrated crying, and a million questions being asked about all things under the sun
• children leaning intently over their writing/ drawing/ painting work, lost in the moment of creation
• natural objects for children to study--rocks, leaves, bugs, etc--treasures from their rambles outside
• well-used books that were written by the children as well as some readers that focus on Maori life
• a celebration of children's best attempts to communicate through writing and art
• some elements of a "traditional classroom", such as children copying their personal "organic key vocabulary words" on the chalkboard and reviewing these words on cards with each other

One of my guiding thoughts in the classroom was this:  "Teaching is listening.  Learning is talking."  At times, I would doubt myself because my classroom was so much louder and more disorderly than the 2 kindergarten classrooms across the hall;  however, I felt that I was a better teacher when I listened carefully to all of my students and gave them lots of freedom to bounce ideas off each other.  As often as I could, I would act as a scribe for my students in their journals so that they could see their words in print.  Some years, my students were able to put the pieces together and write their own original thoughts on paper.  There were years when the students were able to help each other how to write and read words.  Some groups of students found it difficult to get to this point, and I faulted myself for not teaching them to trust their own spelling and writing.  There were times that I probably did too much work for my students, by writing their words down instead of taking the time to teach them how to trust themselves as writers.   On page 132, Sylvia explains, 

"I talk to them all day.  I answer thousands and thousands of questions.  Mainly they teach themselves.  More and more I think that my converse with them is the main consideration.  I have a very high standard of written composition.  But often the noise is too much at my age.  And this particular brand of discipline.  There's discipline all right.  But it's the inner, instinctive discipline that obliterates the external, the imposed brand.  But oh, life is so appallingly short.  I hope I have the courage to run a real infant seedbed, allowing the marvellously abstract pattern of behaviour that pushes up from the unconscious.  When I'm rocking in my armchair at ninety and looking back I'll never forgive myself if I haven't used this time.  Think of the regret that old age could be!  To review the past and perceive what you could have done!  Had you the courage!"

I will end here and write a post tomorrow about the ways in which Teacher inspires me to action as well as the more painful, discouraging parts of her book.