My day with Christopher

It was a day like any other. I woke up with that feeling in my throat that suggests that my throat isn't sure whether it's sore or just temporarily annoyed. I jumped out of bed committed to the idea of making a cup of tea immediately in order to combat this threat. It sounded like a lovely idea, and I kept it at the back of my mind as I proceeded to do anything but make that cup of tea. Eventually my Once and Future Roommate Sarah sent me an IM because she desperately needed to chat with me about the pizza rolls she'd had for breakfast, so, needless to say, it was an hour before I finally had that cup of tea and it seemed that the peculiar tickle at the back of my throat was there to stay. I'd survive. I've lived through worse. Dealing with a sore throat is generally easier when you aren't on your way to a Pre-K classroom where singing at the top of your lungs and shouting at children to stop climbing the walls are both fairly commonplace. But that's all beside the point. The point is that I was feeling only slightly off, but off all the same.

And for a while, everything was fine. I came in the building and got down to business. I was on a role! I'd only been in this particular classroom for one day and I was already confident enough about the routines to take care of setting up before the teacher returned from lunch. I prepped notebooks. I set up the attendance board. I booted up the smartboard in preparation for circle time. It was smooth sailing. Until the children came in.

My role in the classroom, at least for the week, is essentially to sub for the SEIT who is usually in the room. My art therapy background technically constitutes a special education background in New York State, so the arrangement works for everybody. Essentially, working as a SEIT involves a lot of one-on-one work with a child, helping them with skills on an individualized basis. There's a lot of sensory adaptation and whatnot, which was pretty much all I did during my senior practicum last year - albeit unsupervised and with considerably younger children - so it's not terribly challenging in comparison. It felt like a good fit for me. Two days had passed, and I'd worked with two children, and learned the names of all of the others. The day before I knew all of their names. I would have been completely confident picking any of the children in the class out in a line up.

Today, however, I decided they were all named Christopher.

I called the child I was working with one-on-one Christopher despite spending a large chunk of time working with him on writing his name. I called just about every single boy who came to play at the center I was supervising Christopher. When someone asked me a question, I once suggested that they should seek out Christopher to help them. It was all quite bewildering, mostly because none of the children were answering me and I really couldn't figure out why. It wasn't until a little girl, assuming I was being my normal silly self, laughed out loud and exclaimed “His name isn't Christopher!” that I realized just how many times I'd done it. And I couldn't stop.

There is no child named Christopher in the class.

So I made it through the rest of the day somehow, pledging to take a moment to think before calling children by name. When I got home I had a second cup of tea (this time immediately!) and sat down to decompress. They always tell you that you're going to have days where you feel like the most incompetent teacher in the world, and it's true. Usually it has something to do with phrasing something badly and accidentally hurting a child's feelings, or making a bad discipline choice that you can't take back. I didn't do that to any of the children at school today. I take no credit for what I may or may not have done to poor Christopher, however, whoever he is.