Learning the hard way

 “Fingers on the lips. Fingers on the lips. NOW!”

Thirteen little voices echo my words back at me and thirteen tiny forefingers obediently press into a line of pursed lips. My five-year-old class is silent … momentarily, so finally we can move. Off we march in an orderly fashion  through the double doors leading away from the playground and up the stairs toward the classroom. On the second flight of stairs, I hit a blind spot and the cannier members of the group take advantage of it to break ranks and charge screaming along the corridor and into the classroom. Our four-year-old neighbours, lined up obediently and still waiting for orders to proceed, glance up at their teacher seeking some explanation for the human hurricane that has just torn past them. I too glance at her and her regiment. She doesn’t approve but I have no time to wallow in shame, hell has broken loose in my classroom and I wade in there feeling decidedly unhopeful about restoring calm.

The children like the “fingers on the lips” mantra and so I resort to it now. Once I have them sitting quietly around the table and have called the register we can begin the process of learning some English. But it’s me who has learnt most in the five months since I was nominated teacher of these tiny human beings. Until September of last year I had absolutely no contact with children … of any age, never mind five year olds. Adults, strictly adult education, was my domain. Outside of it I have learned that the rules are entirely different, or so it seems to me.

 For a start I am of the impression that strict routine and organisation is fundamental to establishing and maintaining control. First we do this, then this, and then this, and finally that. And we do it the way I say, no other way. Any deviation generally causes uproar. To prevent uproar, I need a game plan and I need to be organised down to the last detail. Turning my back on the class to shuffle undecidedly among my photocopies – even for a few seconds – risks chaos. I tell the children I have eyes in the back of my head, “Yes, I can see them. Little red ones,” pipes up Laura. Others murmur their assent, but only the most docile. Eric and Roberto look sceptical and resume kicking each other under the table. Kicking is much less lethal than their usual sport, fencing with sharpened pencils, the objective being to poke an eye out. If their behaviour deteriorates, there is always the option of asking one or the other to leave the room. Inevitably, that happens but it no longer worries me.

I have come a long way since the first class on my first day at the school in September, which left me “traumatised” and I don’t use the word lightly. On that day, unaware as I was of the need for sergeant major tactics, I blithely urged the children to follow me, “Vámonos. Let’s Go.” And indeed they did. They swarmed on ahead of me, up the stairs and charged into the classroom, hardly pausing to open the door. When I strolled in Eric was trampolining on the tables, Roberto had become a whirling dervish, Miguel was repeatedly crash diving on the floor and two of the girls were screaming in the corner. The rest were jumping up and down in a group frenzy, or so it seemed to me. After that start to the lesson, it only got worse and I emerged at the end of fifty minutes having aged fifty years.

On that first day I knew nothing about the importance of a system of rewards and “punishment” via the system of happy and sad faces, aka bribery. Now, each child who behaves well receives a copy of a happy smiling face at the end of the class and two happy faces can be exchanged for a sticker. The “sticker awards” have become something of a high point in the class and a sea of eager faces often besieges me in the final minutes of each lesson chorusing, “Dóna’m una enganxina” (Give me a sticker)

 Off stage Eric and Roberto are whingeing miserably over the injustice of the system. Each of them grasps a crumpled sad face in their tiny fists which their parents will have to sign. Cruelly, I hold up the prize spider man stickers which Arnau is deliberating over. “Next time, I say, you too can have one of these … if you are good boys.” Eric bursts into tears and buries his head among the coats on the rail behind him.  

For some reason the children have quickly grown fond of me. When I walk into the playground now, I get the celebrity treatment. The collective swarms over to me the second I arrive, joyously crying my name. Mini Catalans hug my legs, tiny hands slip into mine and little faces gaze up at me adoringly.  While I am still wondering what I have done to be worshipped in this way, my heart opens to the deluge and they’re in. Whatever happens, no matter how much they wear me down they have won me over and when I am no longer their teacher and they have forgotten me, the place they occupy in my heart will always be theirs.