Nom d'Artiste

            “Nap Time!” chirps Miss James, Mrs. Sullivan’s new student teacher, as she claps her hands together in neat little triplets. Clap-clap-clap! “Let’s be quick!”

Right Brain

 

            What? Nap Time? Already? 

 

            I’m not ready for Nap Time. I’m not tired. I’m not even cranky. In fact, I am in a great mood. For one of the relatively few times I can remember in a life of years that can still be counted on one hand, I am content. More than content. I am engaged. Busy. Focused. Joyful, even – caught up in the process of seeing, understanding, doing. I haven’t had this much fun since, well, maybe never. So why is she making me stop?

 

            “C’mon, everyone! Let’s put down those scissors!” (Clap-clap-clap!) Put the construction paper back in the center of the table!” 

 

            She watches as our chaotic, mixed litter of four- and five-year-old humans reacts in every way a post-larval child can to an adult imperative, other than to cry. We know better. More than a week into kindergarten, we are all big boys and girls now. Crying was for babies. Our parents and our teachers said so.

 

            A few begin to tidy up their spaces, looking frequently to the teachers to see if they, the kids, were responding correctly to directions, or perhaps to see if they, themselves, were receiving the proper amount of positive attention for doing so. One starts to scrape together scraps of colored paper with both hands, like a poker player raking in her chips. Another slowly stirs his pile of paper in a tight little circle with a single index finger, his brow deeply furrowed in studied attention to the process. Other fingers around the room probe ears, and noses (mostly their own). An occasional thumb is still vacuumed into somebody’s mouth, for comfort, or simply out of habit. Some kids are diligently licking paste from their fingers, or straight from the jar. One little girl is arranging each of her supplies in a neat row in front of her. One child pauses, stubby safety scissors in hand, mouth open, staring distantly at nothing. 

 

            At a nearby table, the dark-haired boy in the red shirt is pretending the stapler is an alligator, and it is hungry. Clicka, clicka. “I’m gonna eat you - arrrgh!” Clicka, clicka. The girl with the brunette curls leans away in terror, holding her paper out of reach of the boy, and his gator. Clicka, clicka.

 

            “Be careful with that stapler, Jeffrey!” says Miss James. Clicka-clicka-clicka. “Here, let me have that.” Click…  “That’s not how we behave, is it young man?” Jeffrey frowns and slumps, dejected.  “Now go get your sleeping pad out of its slot. The one with your name on it, under the letter J. There you go.”

 

            “Now what are you doing, Douglas?” Miss James said. 

 

            I do not respond. My name isn't Douglas. 

 

            I also ignore her order to stop cutting construction paper, continuing instead to do what we’d just been told to do before that, during Art Period: Making Chinese Lanterns.

 

            It’s easy, once you understood all of the complicated steps. First, you cut a narrow strip from the short end of a piece of construction paper. Concentrate when you work the scissors, to make one long cut, as straight as you can. Save that piece for later.  Next, you take the rest of the sheet and make one nice, long fold right down the middle. You have to make the edges match all the way down, or it doesn't work. Your crease will be crooked. Mash that crease down hard with your thumb, so it makes a nice, straight line. Now, you take your scissors again, and make short, straight cuts right into the folded edge, about halfway up into the paper. Keep them about an inch apart, all the way.

 

            Now comes the tricky part. You have to open up the folded paper with all the cuts in it, just not quite all the way. You don't want to make it flat again. Instead, you want to roll it up into a big tube, just past where the corners match, which is kind of hard because the cuts in the paper make it want to bend every which way. Then you can pinch the corners together with your fingers, and use the stapler to…

 

            “Douglas! It’s time for you to stop. You need to put the paper down. Now.” 

 

            I still don't comply. Douglas still isn’t my name. 

 

            Miss James was having none of it. Her grown up hands reach down and snatch my lantern and stapler away from me. “Hey!” I said. “I was using that! I’m making a lantern!” My paper unfurls as she placed it on the pile of scraps in the center of the big round table.

 

            “Art Period is over now, Douglas. Or do you like to be called Doug?”

 

            “I don't like to be called either one. My name is Donald.”

 

            “Oh, no. It says right here on my list that you are Doug. Douglas Stewart.”  Miss James gives me that grown-up ‘you-can’t-fool-me-young-man’ sort of look. “You must be a little trickster, Douglas.”

 

            “My name’s not Douglas,” I say, with emphasis.

 

            “Whatever you say, little trickster. Now go get your mat. It’s Nap Time.”

 

            Bewildered, I am suddenly sentenced to a half hour of enforced idleness, robbed not just of my lantern and cheerful, productive activity, but of my identity, too. What kind of punishment is that? All I want to do is keep working.

 

            Maybe that is how kindergarten works. If you break the rules, they can just change your name. That seems a little extreme, especially when Jeffrey got to keep being Jeffrey. But wait – now that I think about it, they had changed me into someone else even before I had done anything wrong! What is going on here? 

 

            Maybe Miss James hasn't learned about names yet. She looks like a grown-up, and sort of acts like one, but she is just learning how to be a teacher, after all. Maybe there are other things she doesn't know. Miss James is new this week, taking Miss Leslie’s place, who was our teacher-learning-to-be-a-teacher last week. Miss Leslie knew my name. 

 

            Maybe Miss James isn't very smart. Or maybe she is just really mean. She looks like a nice lady, but I already know that doesn’t always mean a person is nice on the inside. I think about that as I unfold my sleeping mat, and lay my head down on the cold plastic cover. If I want to get my name back, I will have to be very careful, and try real hard to behave myself. Or maybe not. Sometimes with mean people it doesn't matter how you behave. They’ll just be mean anyway.

 

            I almost never go to sleep at Nap Time. Most of the other children can, but I usually stay wide awake, trying to be still, trying to keep my eyes closed, peeking out now and then to see if anyone else is looking around, too. If they are, we’ll giggle, and one or the other teacher will tell us to shush, and we’ll go back to pretending to be asleep again. Sometimes a bunch of us will start to giggle, which will make even more kids giggle, and that will make all of us giggle even louder. When that happens, it does not make the teachers giggle. Not at all. It makes them really mad. Maybe that was it. Maybe someone else had giggled at Miss James today, and made her mad. Maybe that’s why she wanted to change my name.

 

            Today it looks like the other children are all getting quiet right away, and after a few minutes nobody else is peeking back at me. If I wait long enough, maybe everyone will be asleep. Maybe the teachers will get sleepy, too. Hmmm… I wait another minute or two, and when I look, they are both at their tables, reading and writing, and not paying any attention at all to any of the sleepers. I wonder if either one of them will even notice if I creep back up in my chair, quiet as a mouse, and start working on my lantern again… 

 

            It will be risky, but even if they do notice that I’m not sleeping anymore, and not peeking or giggling at anybody, they’ll be able to tell right away that I don't really need a nap. That what I really need to be doing is finishing my Chinese lantern. If I stay quiet and busy, I might not get into any trouble at all.

 

            Besides, if they aren’t happy about it, it’s Douglas who will get into trouble, not me. That seems like a reasonable risk to take. 

 

            Another minute or two goes by and I sit up, very slowly, then slip over into my seat at the worktable. Now if I can find my piece of construction paper, all I have to do is roll it up, staple the corners on the top and bottom, then run a line of paste down the edge to seal the seam. That will make the lantern. Then, with that long skinny piece I had to cut off at the beginning, I can bend it over and staple the ends to the top of the tube for a handle, and my Chinese lantern will be done! Yep, there’s my paper, right there, just within reach. Now I’ll just get the stapler, slide the corners of the paper in like the teacher showed me, and Clicka…

 

“Douglas! What are you doing?”

 

I don’t respond. 

 

My name isn't Douglas.

 

 

 

 

First Grade, First Day

Toy Horse (detail)

Following Mrs. Brown’s instructions, we reached into our school bags and got out our new Big Chief blue-lined manila paper tablets, along with our giant First Grade pencils - the fat ones intended to fit snugly into clumsy First Grade fists - each fitted with a bubble-gum pink eraser the size of a gumdrop, anticipating an abundance of First Grade mistakes. These we placed in front of us, the pencils laid to rest in smooth grooves cut neatly into the tops of our desks. We would need them later, Mrs. Brown said. 

For now, we would use our colors, big cigar-sized crayons in the standard eight-pack of primary and secondary hues, plus brown and black. Take out the red one, and do as I do.
 


Open your tablets, she said, her taught straight back turned to us, her hand raised to the blackboard, her voice as crisp as her starched plaid cotton dress. We were going to learn to write today. We were going to learn to pay attention. I did so, or tried to, distracted as I was by the surprising display unfolding before me.
 


Mrs. Brown was writing in red. And she wasn’t writing words, either. I knew that much right away. She was drawing a picture. In colored chalk!



Crayons I understood. Chalk, too. We’d seen it in kindergarten, and at home in the sewing room. Sometimes Grandma let us use it to make hop-scotch squares on the sidewalk. Chalk was white, sometimes light yellow in grown-up grades, but never in colors so rich and vivid. And now Mrs. Brown was writing with it, drawing a long red box in the center of the board, bleeding deep, shiny lines as bold and tangy as strawberry Kool-Aid.

Do as I do, she said again, and I did, mimicking her bright chalk shapes on my page with poor waxy imitations in red Crayola. Mrs. Brown was drawing a wagon! Red rectangle. Black circles for wheels. Brown shaft. Green handle.  I was drawing a wagon, too. My picture looked like hers.

Mrs. Brown wrote a large red S at the top of my paper. Satisfactory, she said. That meant Good, she said. It didn’t look as good to me, though, not any more, now that she had written right on the front of my nice drawing. I looked back up at the board. Nobody put a big S on her picture. Now they didn’t look the same at all.

Lisa, the girl who sat in the space next to me, had drawn a glorious picture, far better in my estimation than my own. Hers was a dark black rectangle filled with circles and triangles and spirals of yellow and green, with a zig-zag red fringe border, blue-purple wheels and a bright orange pull. Lisa was very pleased with her work. Her wagon was different from everyone else’s. It was very different from the one in the middle of the blackboard.

Mrs. Brown did not think it was Good. She marked Lisa’s paper with a broad, cursive U, looping like a deep red cut across the middle of Lisa’s wagon. Unsatisfactory, Mrs. Brown said, making a big frown. Lisa explained that her picture was prettier than the plain red wagon on the chalkboard. Mrs. Brown said that Lisa would have to learn to follow directions. That’s what First Grade is for.

Lisa took her paper back to her desk, buried her face in her arms, and cried for the rest of the school day. She earned many more U’s that year.

I liked Lisa. I liked her very much.

* Originally published in the Birmingham Arts Journal, Volume 4, Issue 3, © 2007, Birmingham Arts Association. Jim Reed, Editor