The Meltdown Year
What happened in kindergarten classrooms last year
When the school doors opened last fall at Bunche Montessori, early-grade teacher Katie Gerdts quickly realized it would be a tough year.
“That moment when you go to redirect a child—normally not a big deal—and the child just flips out, throws their work,” she recalled, incredulously. “And it just kept happening over and over again with different children, screaming and yelling, massive toddler tantrums.”
Without the benefit of much (if any) normal preschool or day care because of the pandemic, many students in Gerdts’ mixed-age classroom were simply not ready to learn and struggled with basic tasks, social skills, and self-regulation. It wasn’t just the academics—Gerdts and her colleagues at the Fort Wayne, Indiana, magnet school knew to expect lags there—it was skills like sharing classroom materials, taking turns, unpacking backpacks, or sitting still for even short periods of time.
That’s how my latest article for Edutopia begins. You can read the whole thing here. Run by the George Lucas Foundation, Edutopia is an online publication that provides solution-oriented content for teachers and administrators. It’s part news and part hot tips. I like writing for them, because they have a nice crew there and their positive message opens a lot of doors; working on their pieces, I’ve chatted with all kinds of people from young, optimistic teachers to trail blazers like Sal Khan of the Khan Academy.
Today, I want to focus on the problem, not solutions.
Over the winter, I became aware that kindergarten teachers were struggling with unique issues at our town’s school board meetings. Parents and teachers were showing up to meeting begging for more support and classroom aides, because the kids were flipping out.
Tangent: I’m such an education geek that I regularly attend our town’s school board meetings — sometimes it’s just me and one crazy dude in the audience. I’ve gotten countless ideas for articles and learned a lot about my community through those meetings. So much democracy happens at the local level, and the news media is missing it. Tangent over.
Now, the COVID shutdowns hit some communities and subgroups harder than others. Little kids, without special needs, in middle class suburbs like mine, had a lot of advantages, including a full time parent at home to arrange social and educational activities, backyards, swim clubs and YMCA sports. Yet, these teachers were still struggling with kids who didn’t know how to behave in a classroom.
If the teachers in our town had a hard time with feral five-year olds, what was happening elsewhere, in communities that had much fewer resources? I was curious, so I proposed the topic to my editor. She gave me the green light, so I found some kindergarten teachers on a Facebook page and gave them a call.
You know you have the right topic when you get on the phone with someone, ask one question and then they don’t stop talking for an hour. That’s what happened last month.
The teachers told me that based on the behaviors that they saw this year, their kids were extremely, extremely isolated for two years. They knew that most had never been in daycare or pre-school. But they also suspected that some of the kids spent those two years in their apartment, watched only by a slightly older sibling, with no stimulation, no interactions with adults. They may have never left their apartment at all, even to go to Target.
In poor or very rural communities, working online was almost impossible. One teacher out in rural Washington state told me that families up in the mountains had no internet access, so the school district parked vans with wifi access in mall parking lots. The parents would have to drive to those parking lots and sit in their cars for a few hours, so their kids could connect with zoom to their teachers and get a few moments of reading and math help.
So, kids arrived in classrooms in September like they were travelers from another world. Teachers said that kids did not know how to interact with other human beings at all. They played by themselves on playground. They didn’t know how to distinguish between an accidental bump on the shoulder in a hallway versus a bully’s punch. Some students didn’t respond to their names when called on. They didn’t know how to address adults, instead just calling all adults, “Teacher.”
As an autism parent, some of their descriptions of kids set off major alarm bells. These are all warning signs for autism, but typical kids were doing these things. Whew!
If a student had to go to the bathroom, they didn't know how to raise their hand and say, “I need to go to the bathroom.” Instead, they would just call out “Pee! Pee!”
Because they hadn’t left the apartments for two years, they didn’t know how to navigate a large school building. Without a great sense of their own bodies, they bounced off walls and desks and collided with each other. They couldn’t walk in a straight line to the playground.
Students usually learn basics about school and education from pre-k or daycare, like the names of school supplies and how to hold a book, but these kids missed all that. One kid didn’t know what a marker was.
One teacher with twenty years of experience told me that she’s never seen anything like this before. Their jobs were made even harder by on-going rules about masks and social distancing and hand sanitizer - hopefully, we won’t see a return of those measures this fall.
So, teachers had to spend most of the year backfilling all that information and helping mop up the messes. Kids were so freaked out by dealing with this new situation that they had meltdowns - crying or violently throwing things. Teachers had to figure out on the fly how to manage this new situation with many relying on techniques commonly used by special education teachers. Some teachers put new “cooldown corners” in their rooms, where disregulated students could lie on the rug and snuggle plush toys for comfort.
Teachers have taken a lot of the blame for pandemic and the shutdowns, which is unfair. State leaders and major interest groups, not individual teachers, shut schools, while keeping bars and restaurants open. And individual teachers — in this case, some heroic kindergarten teachers — were called to repair damaged children without any additional staff or specialized training to manage this unprecedented situation.
What’s next? Well, the teachers told me that most of their kids caught up with social and behavioral skills by the end of the year. A few kids never recovered, they said, and will be identified as special needs students. But they admitted that they couldn’t spend much time on academics. So, this year’s first grade teachers are going to have the mammoth job of improving those kids’ academics.
Socialization and community life is not something that should ever be taken away from young people again. It is as vital to life as water and sunlight. We have done a horrible social experiment on children — one that would never be approved by any university research committee — and we have to help them recover together and not put that burden on this year’s elementary school teachers.
LINKS
That was a bummer of an essay, right? Sorry. I have to tell the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable.
I haven’t written much elsewhere, because we were away in Canada last week. This week, I had a last minute work project and a visit from in-laws. Some Canada pictures here and here.
We’re talking about this New Yorker article on Serena Williams. She’s truly an amazing person. This article reminded to check out the King Richard and her Vogue essay. I love this paragraph about how her dad recognized the importance of the serve and how he trained the girls.
What makes her toss so effective is its precision and its consistency; what makes its precision and consistency possible is her ease. There is tension in the moment—some of her best serving happens under duress—but none in her left hand. She cradles the ball delicately. Her toss does not drift under pressure, nor drop when she’s tight. It takes a lot of training to achieve that kind of consistency, no matter the situation, no matter the choice of serve. It involves a mastery that is not only mechanical but psychological. There are stories about Venus and Serena as children throwing footballs to develop the motion and rotational power of their shoulders. Richard Williams understood how fundamental the serve was, and how his daughters could gain a competitive advantage by mastering it perfectly and early.
Sometimes I wonder if we should have trained our kids with the same dedication as Richard Williams. Ah well. They’re fine.
I continue to be fascinated about the collision between celebrity and philanthropy worlds that is Meghan and Harry. They are trying so super hard to make philanthropy into a global, profitable brand, and it’s just not working. They just announced that they are going to visit their favorite charities in the UK (while dragging along Netflix cameras), but without visiting his brother, who will be a 10 minute walk from their UK house. You gotta read the hate comments that some poor organization is getting, because they agree to host the pair. He has a memoir coming out at the end of the year, which will could allege that the British government had something to do with Diana’s death and had nothing to do with the fact that the driver was drunk.
My spec ed kid spent all last year in a literal basement. (How can they do that?) But the spec ed kids in Minneapolis are being shunted to a virtual basement. (Evil!) MPS says they don’t have enough staff.
Watching: Reservation Dogs, What We Do In the Shadows, She-Hulk, The Bear (second time) Next up: The Boys
Reading: How The Other Half Learns – a profile of the Success Academy charter school and its founder, Eva Moskowitz.
Pictures: Place Royale, Montreal. Carbs and Caffeine in Quebec City.