#literacy tutor

“Love your stinkers” seems to be the chorus of a song every preschool teacher, tutor, paraprofessional, and director knows. If you have just taken up a job as one of these esteemed members of the community, congratulations: you, too, are about to join the cast of Love Your Stinkers: The Musical. You’ll soon memorize the script and know all the moves. You’ll be able to solve any problem merely by shouting out that refrain (bonus points if you throw in some jazz hands). “Love your stinkers!” you will cry, and lo and behold, as soon as the last notes of the song fade away, it will be true. Repeating how much you adore your trouble makers will have turned them into model citizens and yourself into saint. At least, that’s what all of the more experienced staff members at the meeting will imply.  

I’m here to tell you a secret, though. I am a preschool tutor. I am a relatively good human being. And I don’t love all my stinkers. In fact, I even think I’m a better friend to the kids for having accepted this about myself.

Let me explain.

There are usually four adults in any given class I work in. That’s handy when there are 20 children in a class, but when there are only seven preschoolers or less on any given day in an afternoon group, we sometimes wind up laughing about it. Our big bodies get in each other’s way and we have extra time to make our own art projects alongside the kiddos. We’re all aware that the ratio is almost ridiculous. We’re aware of it—but we don’t necessarily take advantage of it. When things get tough, we actually all pretty much stay where we’re at. I’m not sure why the more experienced paras don’t ask to be tagged out. But I know why I didn’t: “love your stinkers” implies that walking away is an act of unkindness.

I no longer believe this is so, of course. And through telling you the story of my interactions with a little “friend” of mine—we’ll call him Licky for reasons that will later become obvious—I’m hoping to convince you of the same. By telling you about the misadventures of a germaphobe in the wild world of Lickly Land, I want to demonstrate that knowing you are incapable of being a good friend to a specific child is technically an act of kindness. Maybe you’ll find Licky as icky as me; maybe you won’t. That’s sort of the whole point. There needs to be some of us in each camp, and in order to best help a child thrive, we need to be able to be honest about who’s who.

Anyway.

I knew Licky and I were going to have issues from day one. While the teacher read, he sat absently licking his hand, up and down, up and down, and I watched in horror. The process looked familiar and soothing to him. It was anything but to me. I had clasped that hand in my own to help him turtle-write his name just that morning. What exactly had I been clasping? Five fingers… Or five billion germs? My hand sanitizer was in a pocket in my purse, which was in a drawer in my desk, which, in turn, was just in the next room.

Never before had my hand sanitizer felt so far away.

The year proceeded exactly as you’d imagine it would. I held out my hand to collect his nametag at snack; he returned it with a bite taken out of the corner. Because I brought a cold lunch and he did as well, we were some of the first to sit down and thus had to eat together. Every day. I usually spent the majority of the half hour trying to keep him from eating food off the cafeteria floor. Unfortunately, the kid managed to get weird stuff into his mouth whether we were eating or not. Licky insisted on using his teeth to open everything, only to discover he could not open anything that way. He would then carelessly pass the slobbered-on object to me to deal with. He chewed on marker caps, he sucked on his sleeves, and he liked to stand on the wooden legs of a giant old mirror in our classroom (dangerous) and press his open mouth to the glass (gross). He stretched his boogers between his fingers like chewed gum. He grabbed an IGDI alliteration card from my hands, shrieking, “Kiss! Kiss!” when he noted the lips in the bottom row, and then proceeded to do exactly what he said to my card. With tongue.

I washed my hands until they cracked up and bled when I typed that winter. Licky made me feel like my head was going to explode, propelled off my neck by a sickening force from deep within my stomach. Furthermore, without my head acting as a cap to hold everything in, I was pretty sure a series of police sirens, firework whines, and haunted house screams would come bursting out of me. Licky struggled to stay seated or even awake during message or quiet time in addition to all of the oral fixation business, and trying to keep him where he needed to be—and his tongue in his mouth, where I firmly believed it needed to be—kept my limbs tight and tense. Licky had my mind so frazzled that my body felt it, too.

He didn’t like me much, either. I asked him to focus when he was sleepy. I took things away that clearly belonged in his mouth. I made him wash his hands before I’d hold them, and I even had the gall to tell him he couldn’t eat Lunchable cheese after he’d dropped it on the cafeteria floor and mashed it in with his fist. What kind of monster was I, exactly? And why did I keep ordering him to drop his toys and come learn new words with me? It was so boring, he could just cry.

Sometimes, he did.

There weren’t real tears. It was more like he was whimpering and whining in a high pitch and pulling comically tragic faces so we’d believe he was crying. Licky’s exaggerated frowns would have actually been funny if the routine wasn’t so downright aggravating and embarrassing. He was five, I was 22, and without the teacher’s help, I’m not sure I ever would have won these battles. Licky would appeal to the teacher, the teacher would side with me, and then I would get him all to myself for interventions. 

Wahoo.

Licky, quite clearly, was my stinker. I knew it. The teacher knew it. Heck, even Licky probably knew it. And so did my Internal Coach. She was an experienced-preschool-teacher-turned-ECFE-director who had very strong feelings about words like “naughty,” “difficult,” and “gross” when they were used to describe children, and she really wanted me to improve my rapport with Licky, along with the rest of my stinkers. Loving Licky and my other stinkers was stressed so much, it was actually my Reading Corps goal in my calendar book for months in a row. I needed to work on making better connections with these kids if I was to make a difference in their literacy levels or their lives. But whenever I was asked about my progress with Licky at staff meetings (none. Always none. Stop asking), I was basically given the same piece of advice over and over: I had to love him, because the fact that he fell asleep all the time proved something was not right in his life and he needed love the most. So forge a relationship with him! Find out what he likes! Make a point of being his buddy and sitting with him! Give him high fives and tell him what you like about him! Love your stinker!

I couldn’t seem to do it, though, and the more I tried to force it, the worse our relationship got. Licky wandered away from sign-in one morning detached and crying, and I both saw and felt that something between the two of us had finally, truly snapped. I needed help. However, I didn’t know how to describe the situation honestly to the other staff members so that I could get the help I needed. Because my Internal Coach was such a passionately positive and nurturing teacher, using phrases like “I feel hopeless” that would fully illustrate my situation was unthinkable. I would look like an unfeeling monster. I would get lectured. They wouldn’t want me back next year (that’s what I thought, at least). Ultimately, the only thing I felt safe saying was that Licky’s scores were not improving and that I couldn’t get him to trust me, and it was far too vague. It didn’t get me the advice or solutions that could have helped me. All it got me was—you guessed it—“love your stinker.” I knew I couldn’t, but I stayed quiet. What other choice did I have?

A few others, it turned out. I just wouldn’t learn that by such conventional means as a Reading Corps training session or a preschool staff meeting. My troubles with Licky were not solved by loving him unconditionally, by switching to a new Reading Corps intervention, or by strategizing with my colleagues. They were solved by an extended vacation, of all things. Licky went back to his birth country for two months in spring, and by the time he came back, he had more or less forgotten about me, and I had moved on to running interventions with other children. New routines were in place. I had different priorities, and my Internal Coach agreed with those priorities. My relationship with Licky had been moved to the backburner. Yet miraculously, he no longer whimpered at the sight of me approaching or rebelled in the cafeteria by gobbling up stepped on cheese while maintaining eye contact with me. I said, “Hey, buddy, could you come here a second?” and Licky came. I said, “Germs. No. Please let me throw that away,” and he mournfully said, “Okay” and relinquished his squashed cheese. What was this madness? I wasn’t sitting with him during morning message, tickling his shoulder blades to keep him awake. I wasn’t following him around at Quiet Time, ordering him off the mirror to keep him from cracking his skull when he inevitably fell off the wooden legs to the linoleum. I wasn’t even eating lunch with him anymore—I’d stay at his table just long enough for another para to make it through the lunch line, and then I’d get up and find kids to eat with who grossed me out less. I was putting no effort into being his friend. So why was he doing so much better when I did finally work him back into my intervention schedule?

Because Licky was spending the rest of his day with Kay, a para who had already raised two children and feared no germs, and coming into far less contact with me. That’s why. Licky never made it out of the red zone for IGDIs, but he did build his vocabulary and ability to focus enough to make it past the practice tests for Rapid Automatic Naming and alliteration, and I give full credit for these accomplishments to Kay. Kay cuddled his germy little self and let him snooze in the mornings so that by the time I worked with Licky in the afternoons, he felt awake and loved enough to learn. Unconditional love did help this stinker—it simply didn’t come from me. 

And that’s okay.

I do not miss Licky. The preschool teacher I worked with always said with a soft smile that it was the most difficult children to reach who she wound up missing the most (a remix of the popular “Love Your Stinker” song), but when Licky left on the last day, I waved goodbye with great exuberance and little desire to ever see the kid again. 

I did, for the record. We ran into one another at the grocery store, and even though he had been licking his arm up and down, up and down right before we made eye contact, I still got down on my knees to catch him when he came running at me for a hug.  

But that’s not the point.

The point is that “love your stinkers” is an important philosophy, but not an infallible one— and that it’s also kind of obnoxious and counterproductive in some situations. For example, repeating it religiously might scare those new to teaching off from bringing their problems to you. This was the major miscommunication between my Internal Coach and me. It turns out I could have talked to her along. She slipped up and used the adjective “naughty” one time at a meeting later in the year, and I’d never liked her as much as I did at that moment. She tried to correct herself, saying, “The only thing that’s naughty is saying the word ‘naughty,’” but I grinned at her and laughed, “No, no, it’s okay.” I was so delighted to discover I wasn’t a monster and she wasn’t a saint—we were both just human. She also quite proudly told a speaker who came in spring that our staff was large enough for us to take a step back from tense situations and take a breather before we got mad. This was news to me, and it was good news. I stopped spending lunch with Licky the next week. But it was April by this time, and I could have gotten this information from her as a solution to my mounting frustration much earlier in the year if I’d only known I wasn’t going to be chastised for being unhappy with Licky. To be honest, that’s all I ever heard when I was told to love my stinkers: admonishment. I heard that anything but absolute enthusiasm and adoration was an act of unkindness. The truth of the matter is that walking away from that one child who drives you nuts before you lose your cool is an act of kindness.     

So to those interested in preschool-life who are considering joining the cast of Love Your Stinkers: The Musical, I say this: tread carefully. It’s wildly important to be kind to the children and to give them what they need, but it’s also important to be kind to yourself and to know you can’t always give them what they need. In the end, it’s alright if you have one or two students you can’t work with and who don’t absolutely love. You’re human.