the offWhites

Today, in my kindy class, I let my students “read books” as they finished their snack. They love this, even though they don’t so much read as idly look at the pictures and then leave the books on the floor to stomp on as they go for another. I don’t really expect much more from three-year-olds, but it’s a little hard on the books. It’s especially hard on the hard-cover picture books with regular, thin paper. For whatever reason (I’ve given up on trying to find any logic in almost anything I don’t understand here, especially as it relates to this particular job), we don’t have many board books, but lots of pretty picture books.

Guess what? A few finally broke under the stress of providing 15 3-year-olds with such unrestrained entertainment. One lost 2 or 3 pages, but the other one actually BROKE - its spine split and the covers tore apart. My co-teacher sort of lost it on the kids, and wanted me to back her up. I did, but only half-heartedly. It seems unrealistic and unfair to expect these kids to understand how and why to treat the books properly, and honestly, I’ve never heard her say anything to the kids regarding the proper care and feeding of the pretty books (in Chinese or English), and nothing I’ve ever said about being nice to the books has really registered (them not really speaking much English and all). I think if I ran the world (or just had some modicum of authority over the materials my classroom was equipped with), I’d toss most of the regular picture books (or at least hide them and use them for story time only), replace them with lots more board books (and maybe even some fabric books) of the more indestructable variety, and enjoy the fact that the kids want to read books instead of getting angry when they love them too violently. (Oh, and I’d make sure a lot more of them were in English, since it’s a bilingual kindy and the parents are clearly paying a premium for all that super English learning. But that’s another issue, I guess.)

Things I Can Do In The US That I Can’t Do In Taiwan:

3. Make and eat biscuits and gravy. Oh, lordy, biscuits and gravy. So good. So not hard to make, as long as you can actually get your hands on chub of breakfast sausage and have plenty of time to stir. (Once upon a time, I didn’t like gravy, preferring butter and honey and jelly, letting Mom and Dad eat all the gravy. Once upon a time, I was a so, so, SO missing out on the starchy, porky goodness that is baking powder biscuits and sausage gravy.)