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The Things I Learnt From Teaching Kindergarten
Friday, June 28, 2013 • 9:02 PM
This post is the first part of a mini-series called “The things I learned from teaching Kindergarten”. It is based on my experience at a job I took up during the my school vacation. Going in, I knew I was going to learn a lot from the children, I just didn’t realise that the impact of their fresh perspectives would be so lasting on me. Enjoy!:)

You know what's both depressing and beautiful about teaching kindergarten? It's the knowledge that because that is the way of the world, one day the children's candid comments might be laced with malice. They might not dare to be as creative as they are now because they cave in to parental/societal/peer pressure, that they might become manipulative and no longer say things with the most honest of intentions as they do now. But right now just for a while they are uncomplicated, undamaged and perfect. Maybe that's why my job as a teacher made me so happy: because for 8 hours a day it fuelled a fantasy that people can be perfect. Imagination- Sometimes I sit and wonder why I find it hard to think of original ideas for essays or assignments or even for games. I feel jaded by the irony that my innovative ideas all follow a pattern and sound uninteresting even to my own ears. Then one day I was watching over a kindergarten class as they played with a box of coloured Lego. Then something quite astounding happened. Slowly but surely the classroom transformed into a zoo, a restaurant, an ice-cream shop and even a hospital all within the span of a few minutes. Their only tools? The box of Lego. The blocks became medicine, burgers, and a chocolate-chip cone as they played without care. I knew with the same blocks, I would have constructed a conventional tower or bridge( maybe with a few fancy extensions) instead of what the kids were doing. Maybe it’s because while I wanted to think out of the metaphorical box, I was afraid to veer too far away from it. But I think the real reason was that I wasn’t used to trying harder to be creative. I had become stuck in a certain pattern of thinking and that was why I envied the children’s borderless creativity. The human imagination is far beyond what we can conceive in our comfort zone. If you can’t think of a new idea, remember that if a 5-year-old can come up with a better idea, so can you.




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Alisa Maya
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