Childhood Exposed?

I taught elementary school music during the height of low-rise jean popularity. (Can low-rise jeans be said to have a heigth of popularity?) You might remember that at the apex of said fashion statement, the highest high brought the lowest low. That is to say, the jeans were extremely low cut. And lower even than that was perhaps the pentient that young parents had for putting their children into the low jeans. Parents of kindergarteners, paricularly, young 20 somethings were determined to make their child the most popular thing right off the bat by putting them in the latest styles, in an effort to help them avoid all the trauma of the friendless junior high years that they suffered from. (We all suffered from them. And once we deal with them, we learn that the suffering was somehow formative. But until then, we somehow make a whole lot of efforts to see that our own offspring won't have to suffer them.)

And as an elementary school music teacher, faced with managing a classroom of 75 kindergarteners at a time, I employed an old Mid-west trick for maintaining control. When things got too loud or needed to transition without the mess, we sat in "Tornado Position". Heads down, hands over the backs of our necks. But a kindergartener from the mountain regions doesn't quite grasp how to put their head down while sitting criss-cross-applesauce, and so they shift towards the familiar, which in Utah is family prayer style with bowed heads. And the 75 kindergarteners in low rise jeans would wiggle and turn their bodies around until they managed to kneel, put their head down, cover their necks with their hands, whispering and giggling and letting their pants simply slide down.

I'm not exactly sure, but I think you haven't really lived until you have been mooned by 75 kindergarteners all at once.

And I know there are horrible people and perverts out there that make such things an impossibility, but I always wished I could have taken a picture of it. The innoncence of 75 cracks staring at me every Wednesday and Friday at 10am.

Today is Water Day. We are fully into our summer camp days, which means the schoolish type learning is over and the real learning of childhood is in full swing. We go on a field trip once a week, we spend a day baking cookies once a week, we have field days and bike days and craft days and once a week we have a special day for the teachers. We put the kids in swimsuits and turn the hose on them. The kids think its for them. They think the fun and games of playing in a sprinkler is extra special because the teachers get excited about it too, and then we get outside and they run and scream and jump in puddles and dump water on each other, all the while the teacher stands there manning the hose. Do you think it's cruelty to offer a child a drink from the hose and then spray them in the face instead? Silly. It's a game. I count out loud to thirty, and whoever is taking a drink when I get to thirty gets doused. Some of them try to be there at thirty. I count slower or faster depending on who really needs to be soaked. And when we get back into the classroom, they change back into their warm dry clothes and I change back into a fair and balanced teacher. And they all sleep really well for naptime.

Of course, the connection to all of this is again the case of the crack. For about 45 minutes I have 20 naked children running around the classroom. Because try as I may to regulate things, every single one of them will forget to bring something or another over to the bathroom to change. and they will only realize it after they have stripped down, so they will run as fast as their naked legs will carry them over to their cubbie, find the forgotten item, and run back. And no matter how I regulate how many children are in the bathroom at once, several extras will be too excited to wait their turns and sneak in while I'm not looking. And once we are in our swimsuits we will have so many wedgies on the girls and low-rise on the boys that propriety is an impossibility. And our playground is level with the office windows of the cubicles that we share a building with, and i have no doubt that people sitting there enjoy the innocence of the play as much as the rest of us do. They too know the joy that is being mooned by an unsuspecting kindergartener.

Of course we try to teach them to keep their dresses down and pull their pants up. Of course we teach them to cover their bodies and be aware. And their innocence is both sweet and scary, and I wish we could simply leave it as sweet. But they are growing up as quickly as the world is growing into a frightening place. And we give them safe places where they can be children while learning to face that frightening world, and while most days I am very frustrated by my job, by the frightening people that are perhaps too close to the innocence, and by the closed and uneducated minds that don't protect as well as they should, there are also days when I get mooned by 10 kindergarteners and I don't think I want any other job on the planet.