Speechless

         I have never been a person that struggled to “find the words.”  My mother used to stop at Walgreens to buy earplugs before we went on family road trips so she wouldn’t have to hear me talk for the entire drive. My father was a big fan of the quiet game - you know, the one where you can see who can stay quiet the longest? I always lost.  I did, however, learn from an early age that people were impressed by my gusto. I called the radio station to request the “kitty ditty” at age two and a half, and my parents used me as a sort of party trick when I was three and could sing all the lyrics to every song on a Jackson Five album.

While my parents may have wished that I was a bit less talkative, it sometimes served me quite well. Giving toasts and speeches off the top of my head comes as a second nature and I often receive praise for my eloquent way with words at events and parties. It also led my mother to enroll me in the debate team in middle school and high school, and to this day I have never lost a debate. My mother thinks that I inherited the “manipulation” gene from my father, although I prefer the word “persuasive” to “manipulative.” My sister, the quiet one, is one hundred percent convinced that if I went to Hogwarts I would be in Slytherin because I am “more cunning than Tom Riddle.” Is it wrong that I took that as more of a compliment than an insult? Probably. 

It wasn’t until this year that I had any trouble finding responses to any question posed at me.  You see, my major is elementary education, and while I know that I am good with kids, truly enjoy teaching and don’t find it tedious at all to write lesson plans, it has challenged me in ways I never expected. 

In high school, I worked in a toy store and I never had trouble helping kids pick out the coolest toy or book and I could help any parent pick the perfect gift for any birthday party their child had to attend. After high school, I worked for a year abroad as a nanny to a two year old and a five year old, it was a dream job: good experience for my major, easy, and I got to travel a lot with the family. Luckily, the kids who I nannied for were angelic and content with drawing, reading, and ate nearly every vegetable I cooked for them. I left feeling extremely confident in my skills as an educator. It wasn’t until I started working in an actual elementary school that I started to realize that maybe I wasn’t as gifted with words as I had thought. 

You see, when talking to an adult, you can convince them of almost anything if you speak with conviction, passion, and you throw in some really convincing facts, statistics, or quotes. With kids...they call you out: they want an answer and they want it now. They don’t want your bull shit with fancy words and a quote from Thoreau, they just want an answer. And their questions and statements are generally ones that leave me coming up with nothing, for the first time in my life.

“Ms. Katie, why does it hurt when someone punches someone else in the ball sack?”

      I don’t know! I’m not a boy, it just does, so don’t do that! That is what I would have liked to say, because you can’t exactly explain to a kindergartener why it hurts, and what a “ball sack” is, I’ll leave that to their parents. Instead, after a long time finding the words, I settled on something super lame like “you know, we shouldn’t really be punching anyone on the playground because it will probably hurt no matter where you punch them.” Such a weak answer.

“Ms. Katie, there’s someone peeing in the sand box”

     Now, how do you handle that? Do you tell the little boy (who is in fact peeing in the sandbox, for an audience) to stop peeing mid-stream and move it to the bathroom? Do you yell at him in front of his peers? What happens to the sandbox now? Do we close it? Should I call his parents? I settled on a calm talk in the office, followed by being banned from the playground for the rest of the day, and a note sent home to his parents.

I still have a long way to go, but I feel like I’m making progress. The kids challenge me every day, but it makes me feel like a better person that when I give them answers, or take any actions, it’s after careful (albeit frantic) thought and it’s the most honest answer I can give them. And sometimes, I still come up with nothing. Like the other day, I noticed that a group of third grade boys were holding weddings for their lego people:

“Hey guys, this looks like fun... why are they all getting married?”

“So they can have SEX!”

I pretended not to hear.