Stop signs

After two weeks, Will is finally convinced that he can’t go back to the Glowworm Room, and he is now in fact a Caterpillar. He seems to like his new class well enough and loved being the bell ringer last week; their jobs are so cute—door holder, line leader, bell ringer—and they take them so seriously. He already knew how tag names work: each child has a little laminated picture of a box of crayons with their name written on the front and with a strip of Velcro on the back. When a kid wants to play in the block center, she puts her tag name on one of the three Velcro spots in that center, and when three kids are playing there, that’s all she wrote. Everybody else has to wait until one of those kids come out. I guess this keeps the block wars down to a manageable level. The Glowworms used tag names and had a similar meal and nap plan too, so Will had no problems adjusting to most of the room’s already familiar routines.

But my sweet William has also been discovering consequences this past week. Not to say we don’t have them at home, but it’s different when it’s a new teacher dishes them out. I have to say too that my initial impression that Ms. Tammy is a clam has been confirmed. I picked him up the other day, hello how are you?, nothing out of the ordinary, and didn’t realize at all until the next morning that Will had gotten in trouble the day before.

I had a meeting out of town early that morning and needed to hit the road pretty quickly, so of course when I dropped Will off at school, he was in that leg-clingy hold me hold me hold me mode. His favorite spot in his classroom is currently the housekeeping area, where they have your pretend stove and fridge and dishes and fake fruit and whatnot, but most intriguing of all, the dress-up closet, filled with costumes and old clothes that kids have grown out of. Last week’s winner was a police office costume, complete with a little cloth cap, and so I offered to help Will “dress up into a policeman,” as he likes to say. It took me a while at first to realize what was going on, but he just got weird all of a sudden, literally hanging his head and refusing to make eye contact and mumbling something I couldn’t quite catch. Ms. Kisa, who comes in first thing in the morning and has left by the time I pick Will up, is a little chattier, and she finally filled me in.

Evidently the day before he had one of his little moods when he can’t make up his mind. I find decisions difficult myself at times, so it’s not hard for me to imagine that choices for a three-year old could be just staggering. Will had two dolls, but was playing with one, and another child asked to play with the second. With some encouragement from his teacher, he decided he could share, but he couldn’t make up his mind which doll he wanted to give up. It sounded to me as if Ms. Kisa and the other child must just possess realms of patience, as she described swapping dolls back and forth several times before she told him his next decision was final. Predictably, he gave up a doll and then had a fit because he wanted to share the other one, and at this point, in a movement I imagine as one long melodramatic sweep, he knocked all the toys off the table they were playing on.

The rule in the Caterpillar Room is that if you misbehave with toys—throwing them, for example—or if you refuse to clean up after playing in a center, you get a stop sign on that center. The teacher cuts out a red construction paper octagon, writes the offender’s name on it, and then tapes that up where their tag names go, so when a child gets ready to play in that area, he’ll see his name on the stop sign and remember he can’t play there for a whole day. So William was banned from the housekeeping center.

We’ve seen this sort of tantrum at home periodically, and certainly Will can be stubborn. I’ve watched him once or twice feeling guilty about this or that, like last night when Laura had been cutting out pictures for a school collage and then left the scissors lying around. So Will picked them up and started trying to cut a stray thread off his sock. I came in, saw my baby trying to cut his foot off with these giant scissors, and hollered—well, I can’t even remember what I hollered, but evidently it was loud, because Will about went through the roof. He looked so guilty, although admittedly it was more of the “whoops, I’ve been caught” look, rather than any expression of true remorse.

Whatever happened with that stop sign hit him harder, though. He’s talked about it for days. When other kids got stop signs later that week, he came home full of news about their misdemeanors too. Apparently he’s also been quite prompt at school lately about picking up his messes. Just the threat of the stop sign is enough. He spends such a long time at school everyday while we’re working—and I don’t feel very close to either of his teachers yet, so I imagine him warily watching Ms. Tammy to see if he’s about to be banned again, wishing his parents would come take him home. While I’m glad to hear the Caterpillar discipline methods seem so effective, that morning in his room I just looked and looked at his little red stop sign, his scarlet letter out for all the world to see, and felt just the tiniest bit that his teacher had to be the meanest person on the planet—just for a second. Now, of course, I see red stop signs everywhere; three kids had them in the housekeeping area yesterday, so probably it’s a much more normal part of the day than I imagined that morning, as I contemplated the beginning of Will’s life of crime. I remember Laura’s Butterfly class had the Manners Tree, and how her leaves would float right off that tree at times, and how she survived quite nicely, thank you. So Will and I talked about being patient and sharing, how important and how hard it is, and how stop signs make us very, very sad, but how not sharing also makes our friends sad. Today he might get to turn the lights on and off at group and nap time to get everybody’s attention, or maybe they’ll take a field trip to the library, so no doubt he’s moved on to other things—but oh, that first stop sign.