Day: June 14, 2009

My church primary class is full of particularly active five-year-olds. When people at church ask me which class I teach, I list off the names. By the time I am done listing, their eyes have gone wide and they say “Oh. You have your hands full.” Yes I do. But as my backyard neighbor wisely noted, I like the interesting kids. I would much rather spend two hours figuring out how to wrangle difficult kids than to spend two hours bored sitting next to quiet ones. The kids arrive to me after they have already been sitting for an hour of church. We spend the next hour in a large group meeting. The third hour is spent in a classroom with just our class. That is a lot of sitting for any five-year-old to take. Fortunately the women who are in charge understand children. Some of them are the mothers of kids in my class. They work very hard to keep things interesting for the short attention spans. We also figure out novel ways of encouraging the kids to stay in their seats. I have been known to hand kids an imaginary glue stick and ask them to glue their backs to their seats. We have a good time, and the kids are glad to come even though they sometimes get tired of sitting.

The average attention span in my class is shorter than much of the rest of the room. I am always sure to include in my church bag some objects that are unusual, safe, and quiet. These I pull out when behaviors begin to spin out of control. The most unexpectedly popular of these items is a roll of masking tape. It began when I put tape around the fingers of a wiggly boy. The sensation was so novel for him that he sat for a full ten minutes just listening and wiggling his fingers. Not to be left out, other kids wanted their fingers taped too. Finger taping gave way to simply playing with pieces of tape. One little boy will walk in and immediately demand a piece of tape. Once given it, he promptly sticks the tape to his face. Over his eyes, over his nose, over his mouth, the tape is stuck and unstuck repeatedly. It makes me nervous whenever he sticks it over his mouth. Particularly when several other kids follow suit. Professional teachers have been fired for sticking tape over a child’s mouth and there I am sitting with a row of taped-mouthed children. I know that they stuck it there themselves, but I can’t be confident that this information will be accurately portrayed by an interrogated five-year-old. I can just picture those sweet, smiling faces honestly saying that their teacher glued them to their seats and gave them tape to put over their mouths.

Fortunately I am in no danger of a lawsuit. The other adults in the room see me handing tape to the kids. Then know that rather than using the tape as any kind of punishment, I’m actually warning that I’ll have to take the tape off if the kids can’t be a little more quiet. Also, I know all of the mothers of these kids. Most of them are my good friends and they’re glad to have me as their child’s teacher. It is nice that my teaching philosophy matches that of most of the parents. At this age it is not important to drill kids with doctrine, but just to teach them that church is a good place to be. Deeper understanding of how to relate to God and doctrine can come later. So class time features a brief lesson, storybooks, and playing with duplo blocks. Mostly they build space ships and fly them around the room. It warms my science fiction loving heart to see that building and flying space ships is so generally accepted among this crowd. I do miss attending the adult meetings, but hanging out with kids, masking tape, and Duplo block space ships isn’t so bad.