Yesterday

Yesterday, at the sensory table -- which held rice, a couple of old Fisher Price barns, and a collection of farm animals -- two-year-olds Cecilia and Spencer began to jump up and down, feeding off one another in a rough synchronicity, both making breathy, rhythmic sounds that were similar to laughter.

Yesterday, while we hunted for bugs out behind the green house, two-year-old Zinn, pointed at nothing and said, "A bug!" We all looked carefully, but couldn't see it. I said, "Zinn said he saw a bug." Zinn replied, "I see a bug!" pointing at nothing. Juaquin and Acadia looked more closely, leaning in until their noses nearly touched the ground. One after the other they then said, "I see it!" and there was general agreement that we'd all seen bugs.

Yesterday, at circle time, I was working the felt board, telling the chanted story of a "sleek and fat" pussy cat and five little mice, which it consumes one after another. This is only the second time they've heard it together as a class. As I reached the point where I say, "Along came a pussy cat, sleek and fat . . ." First one, then several, of the kids began to squeal in feigned terror and pretend to escape by running in a circle on our rug.

Yesterday, I couldn't help imagining their future, these two-year-olds together at Woodland Park. I try to stay present because that's their gift to me, but it's hard when I think I can see their futures; project them as four and five-year-olds, as sophisticated as the kids in yesterday afternoon's Pre-K class, all but one of whom I've already been teaching for two years.

Yesterday, I tried to stay present with the older kids because that's also my gift to them, but it was hard because I couldn't help recalling their past, their own first days toddling around our Pre-3 classroom, feeding off one another, jumping up and down, agreeing upon imaginary bugs, and disrupting circle time with better ideas.

Artist’s rendering of the amplituhedron, a newly discovered mathematical object resembling a multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated — the probabilities of outcomes of particle interactions. Illustration by Andy Gilmore

Yesterday, as I tried to help my old friends re-discover their community for this school year, I wondered about the community that my new friends will shape together over two and three year's time. I can still see those two-year-olds in my older kids, but I could never have foreseen the people they would have become together. That's the real task coming to school sets before young children after all, to play together, and from that a kind mutual ethos emerges, shaped from all those experience, a shared sense of humor, and a co-mingling of imaginations. This is what kindergarten teachers remark upon when they find the children of Woodland Park in their classrooms: they already know how to do this.

Physicists tell us that what we know as time and space are accidents of our human inability to perceive the universe as it really is: that the universe is, in fact, perhaps best understood as a geometric shape in which all things exists simultaneously: sort of like all those past and future bugs existing there for us all to see. Usually, I have a hard time getting my mind around ideas like that, but yesterday, I had a small epiphany, having clearly seen a moment of the past and future existing together as parts one thing, right here in the present.

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