Odd skills of kindergarten teachers

by The Flamingo

For the past 14 years I have been a preschool and kindergarten teacher. I love what I do, I am passionate about young childhood and education, about healthy emotional development in the first 7 years of life. This is not an easy job and comes with a lot of challenges, from minor to huge ones. 

This article though focuses on the “little” skills I had to learn in my area of expertise, many of them not known to the people outside of the school domain. 

• Walking backwards on a hallway or up and down the stairs, without even needing to peek behind and at the same time carrying multiple conversations with kids or other teachers who also walk backwards. I’m always surprised that I didn’t break anything in 14 years.
• Reading books upside down, with the pictures of course facing the kids. I tell you this skill is very hard to get, especially when you are reading in multiple languages. 
• Making all kinds of braids for all the princesses in the classroom and all kinds of lego robots for their suitors.
• Exacerbated peripheral view, especially outside in the garden. I tend to have an eye at the back of my neck, which never sleeps, it’s scary for the adults around me. 
• Peeing once a day, during that single break time.
• Knowing how to forget certain disclosures the kids are happy to share to the whole world, like for example: “Did you know that my mommy and daddy sleep naked in bed?” or “Did you know that my daddy talks on the phone when he poops?”…No, I didn’t need to know that. So forgetting their tiny revelings is part of my job until the next parent teacher meeting. 
• Tying 20 shoelaces in under 3 minutes.
• Drawing and painting animals, dinosaurs and Elsas.
• Knowing how many kids and who exactly is missing from the group with just one glance. 
• Knowing how to compose different lyrics to the melodies they already know, so they can learn about new stuff in a fun way. 
• Apart from the day to day teaching responsibilities, being a kindergarten teacher means being at the same time a language teacher, a sports, art and music teacher and a nurse, a counselor, song composer, play writer, play director, parent manager, photographer, accountant and Marie Kondo for your classroom. 
• But the most important skill of all, one that many teachers lack, is to know the exact proper moment to hug a kid and to know exactly what to tell them to make them feel better. 

You know you’re a good teacher when you find letters and drawings from your students with lots of hearts on them in all your pockets and bags. That is their way of telling you thank you. There is no bigger remuneration for this job than that. And of course, seeing after years and years that your students turned out great people. 

Photo from Flamingo‘s archive.