Public Enemy Read online

  BJ’s Kids was seat-of-the-pants as an organized enterprise, but Z felt safe and solid and fully recognized there, lighting up whenever we made the turn onto Eighty-fourth Street, and it quickly became his, and our, second home. Play-dates and picnics and outings followed, and little by little an entire community swung into view. I was parked there already when BJ hired me as an assistant.

  Besides the hard work of taking good care of the swelling gaggle of kids, BJ was trying to manage her embryonic small business, juggling a blizzard of part-time schedules and the cash that flowed in and out daily. Tuition was based on an evolving, dynamic, and idiosyncratic hourly rate—unwritten, uneven, and unclear—that seemed to spring spontaneously and fully-formed from the head of BJ. My first payday was a marvel: BJ pulled her large shoulder bag from the top of the fridge as I was getting ready to leave and rummaged through the bills, emerging with a handful of crumpled up twenties that she handed over to me. “See if that’s right,” she said. I couldn’t remember what we’d agreed on, but it felt OK, so I said sure.

  BJ’s Kids had a row of easels against one wall, a cozy reading corner with lots of books and pillows, a dress-up area stocked with hats and flowing scarves, colorful clothes and costumes, brief cases, hand-bags, cow-poke boots, capes, hats of all kinds, and milk cartons filled with specific items to create a make-believe hospital, pizza restaurant, shoe store, bakery, fire house, and more. It was home-like, hidden and impenetrable—a place to explore and experiment. And beyond this, there was clay, water, sand, and art materials set up and available in a corner near the sinks, a large collage table on wheels with a series of bins containing bits of cloth, shells, buttons, bottle caps, and corks. For Zayd, BJ’s Kids was an infinite treasure-trove of discovery and surprise, and it was also the honey pot, a place to feast and fatten. The joy began each morning in the biggest collection of wooden unit blocks ever assembled—Build! Build! Build!—where Zayd moved in a matter of months from horizontal runways to vertical towers to bridges to archways to entire fantastical worlds complete with characters and action.

  We earned some early childhood notoriety through what seemed to us a harmless enough innovation: we had a large juice and snack table near the sink that we kept stocked and available from the moment children arrived in the morning until the last one left in the afternoon. The table had little cups surrounding pitchers of juice that kids could pour for themselves whenever they liked—with all the attendant spills and stickiness—and paper plates and napkins for the taking, as well as larger plastic serving dishes with sliced apples, celery and carrot sticks, oranges and bananas, cheese and crackers constantly replenished by staff throughout the day. “Disgusting,” said the director of a sister preschool. “You will have roaches and mice everywhere!” “This is bad practice,” advised another. “The kids will eat all day and never learn the importance of meal time.” None of this had occurred to us, and none of it made immediate sense, but we were a bit off-balance and unsure at the start. When a neighbor and friend—a therapist and a feminist whose practice focused on eating disorders—encouraged us to persevere, arguing that the main thing everyone needed to learn in relation to food was self-regulation, and that the operating question should always be, “Are you hungry?” the snack-on-demand table became a quirky signature we embraced.

  This fit with a larger idea that guided BJ’s Kids from top to bottom, beginning to end: kids need to be free to develop from the inside out, not the other way around.

  We created a dazzling collection of good, solid children’s literature by African American, Native American, Latino and Hispanic, Asian and European American authors; books that mirrored for children, culturally and personally; books that stretched them and opened them to different or unfamiliar cultures and situations as well.

  My favorite books were the ones the kids made themselves, stories they dictated to an adult and then illustrated and bound. We had a vast collection about families, pets, monsters, baby sisters, grandparents, trips to the zoo or the museum, space travel and hospitals. One of my most beloved homemade jobs was an ABC book that BJ had developed by gathering the invented toddler-talk all around us into a compilation that arguably improved on the original words in several instances: N is for Nosey, a noun—those hardened bits of dirt and mucous one picks from the nose; B is for Blurries, a noun—sudden bursts of wind-driven blinding snow; R is for Repulsicans, a noun—it’s the party of Ronald Reagan!

  Over time BJ and I developed our own working early childhood education philosophy; we hatched as well a little set of grounded theories about kids, conclusions about how they grew and what they needed, coalescing in the middle of the muddle of our mish-mash classroom. We hadn’t read or heard about any of this, and our observations were not confirmed for us by any research or authoritative sources whatsoever—but we thought putting a toddler in a walker was a form of abuse, asking a little kid to tell what a painting depicted a kind of censorship, and telling a child not to be angry a pathway to neurosis. As BJ would say, “If it’s not true, I’ll eat my shirt.”

  One mid-morning the front bell rang unexpectedly, and in swept Eva Wolfson from the New York City Department of Health—someone had ratted out BJ for running an unlicensed child-care center, and suddenly there was the distinct whiff of danger at the door. Eva was short and tough with BJ, reading her the riot act in her crisply accented voice, and the conclusion was both quick and apparently foregone: the place was substandard, second-rate, out of compliance, and would be “closed by order of the New York City Department of Health.” The phrase evoked images of filthy kitchens and infestations of vermin—I wouldn’t want to eat at any joint that had been “closed by order of the New York City Department of Health”—and the words themselves were tragically definitive and carried the chilling ring of irrevocability.

  BJ’s Kids was spontaneously, naturally homemade, and, of course, an uneasy fit with rules, straight lines, orderly regulations, or city codes. On that first visit Eva checked off the contradictions: improper files and inadequate record-keeping, sloppy documentation of attendance, unacceptable kitchen and bathroom sinks, no approved governors on the hot water faucets, insufficient square footage, inappropriate staffing, and no fully certified teacher. After she left and the kids went down for their naps, BJ cried for two hours, flattened momentarily. She didn’t stay down for long.

  By that evening BJ, who looked so mild and unassuming hours before, had organized a campaign to save the center that would have made Patton proud. Parents were mobilized, politicians contacted, and an elaborate media strategy launched. Ken Auletta visited BJ’s Kids a few days later and wrote a column for the Daily News entitled “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” and both BJ and Eva were suddenly famous.

  Thus began a complicated association. Eva was smart and capable and even, once she dropped that brusque bureaucratic pose, a good mentor for BJ; for her part, BJ was willing to learn and to search for the common ground between dream and reality. The swords were sheathed.

  And within it all was an odd unintended consequence for me as well. I returned to school seeking certification as an early childhood teacher after fifteen years away from the classroom, to the Bank Street College of Education—a perfect fit, it turned out—where I would earn a master’s degree.

  I’d left college with a vengeance and vowed to never look back. School had felt increasingly irrelevant and superficial to me in 1964, and I was straining to escape, burning to dive head first into the real world to end a war and upend the system (this was a time before I’d discovered that all worlds can be real if you’ll let them be, even the world of your imagination). Revolutionaries want to change the world, of course, and teachers, it turns out, want to change the world too—typically one child at a time. It wasn’t as much of a reach as you might imagine: day to day, I had more adrenaline pumping through my veins as a teacher than at any other time in my life.

  In any case, Bank Street quickly won me over and affirmed my basic instincts as a teac
her: the learning child is an unruly spark of meaning-making energy on a journey of discovery and surprise, not a passive receptacle waiting for instructions; every kid is a whole human being with a mind and a heart, a body and a spirit, experiences and aspirations that must somehow be accounted for by an engaged teacher. But from this base my professors at Bank Street went deeper, showing me again and again that the work of teaching is infinitely complex and excruciatingly difficult—becoming a good-enough teacher (like becoming a good-enough parent) was a life project and not some easy fix or formula.

  I learned to practice observing and recording, kid-watching, as a central activity—thick description and time-sampling, artifact analysis and tone-monitoring, and so on. I read Jean Piaget’s stage theory and Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s philosophy.

  Doing some errands one Saturday morning, I said casually to five-year-old Zayd, “There’s a guy named Piaget who says that kids like you think that people think with their mouths.”

  “What?” he said indignantly. “That’s so stupid.”

  “Well, what do people think with?” I asked.

  “People think with their brains, and people talk with their mouths,” he said definitively.

  I decided to interview Zayd for my class project, imitating the format that Piaget used with his own kids.

  Piaget’s insight was that young children are concrete operational thinkers, lacking the capacity for abstraction and inference, relying instead on the visible, the tangible, and the material. I was impressed that Zayd was as clear and confident as he was, and I figured as a modern kid his sophistication was way beyond what Piaget’s kids had access to or knew.

  “So,” I said when we sat down a few days later, “you think with your brain?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “And right now what are you thinking about?

  “A TV,” he replied.

  “And where is the TV you’re thinking about?”

  “There’s a tiny TV inside my brain,” he explained.

  Holy shit, I thought, concrete operational, as Piaget predicted. But onward: “Have you ever forgotten anything?”

  “Sure, like when I forgot to tell Mom the joke from school.”

  “OK, where did that joke go?”

  Without missing a beat Zayd said, “It went right out my mouth.”

  Wow! Piaget rocks!

  From then on any assignment that came my way—child development, literacy, curriculum, teaching—drove me to my own little hands-on laboratory at home: snapshots of toddlers in motion, sketches of family life, representations of young children reaching deep within themselves and clamoring to learn and to grow.

  For a class on art in the early childhood curriculum, I collected a portfolio of paintings and drawings by our guys, usually accompanied by dictated commentary transcribed by me. One morning I said to Malik, “Tell me about this painting”—a colorful set of big swirls and fat lines—and he replied, “That’s me swimming with Zayd, and the river is cold.” I wrote it down and added it to the file.

  And for a course on teaching reading, I kept a diary of our kids’ early language acquisition, writing about how Malik learned to read seemingly in one big gulp without much experimentation or trial and error. He grew up in a literate environment, to be sure, and he was read to all the time. But while Zayd had practiced and worked away at reading, Malik simply picked up a favorite book one day and read it through. Malik was the focus of a paper I wrote called “Perseverance and the Learning Child”—the picture of this little preschool guy self-pitching a whiffle ball hundreds of times in a row in an attempt to hit it onto the roof of the school with his plastic bat day after day is legendary—as well as a paper titled “Compassion in Young Children”—his finely tuned empathy and identification with others on display from the start.

  I had to write a thesis to graduate from Bank Street, and that was hugely intimidating at first—too lofty and scholarly for me—but when my advisor suggested I write a series of brief portraits of teachers teaching, I was relieved and encouraged. I could do that, I thought, story-telling with my own people, a collective enterprise that would honor the work of preschool teachers. The first story I wrote was a portrait of BJ, and I loved it—close to the ground, engaged in practice, collaborative, and interactive. Perhaps you, dear reader—now that you know the phenomenal BJ a bit—can see why this was so much fun.

  I was captivated. I liked college a lot this time, the pinheaded professors didn’t get on my nerves so much, and my big passion became my modest teacher-portrait project. I joined a committee of students working to create a doctoral program at Bank Street so that we could stay on for a few years and keep going. When that effort fell short, a group of us reluctantly applied to Teachers College, Columbia University, and soon enough we started classes right down the street. TC proved to be no less seductive for me, and I jumped in with both feet with my preschool teacher-portraits deepening and strengthening as I trudged forward. TC was much more eclectic than the consistent and sometimes insistent philosophy that undergirded every course at Bank Street—the Bank Street “developmental interactive approach to teaching.” Whew! A common joke among us was that TC had a chapel, where John Dewey once held forth from the pulpit, but that Bank Street was a chapel, with its comforting if limited dogma and Dewey as the resident saint. I loved them both.

  I learned about qualitative research at TC, and I studied ethnography, alternative forms of representation, and collaborative, dialogic, and critical approaches, as well as oral history and all manner of scholarly traditions that used description, narrative, and interpretation to advance systematic inquiry. I loved foregrounding storytelling and story-listening as worthwhile endeavors—narrative suited messy me, but it also accommodated the noisy, idiosyncratic, complex, multilayered, dynamic reality of children themselves, as well as of schools and classrooms. It fit itself neatly to that reality rather than the other way round, hammering the natural disarray everywhere into a convenient if choked-off and clotted frame called research. All the while I was incubating and nourishing my portraits of preschool teachers, keeping them warm and well-fed and happy in the bulging backpack I carried with me everywhere—a teeming tropical rain forest of notes, sketches, and ideas.

  I first got clued-up to the discipline of the desk by the Chicago author David Mamet, of all people, when I read an interview in which he said that he felt that he was only a writer when he completed the last line of whatever piece he was working on; every day before that he approached the desk knowing he was a failed writer. When he finally wrote that highly anticipated last line, well, then he was immediately cast out—he was now an ex-writer. You couldn’t win—failed, former, ex—and yet I aspired to write, reaching toward something mysterious and elusive, and arranging words on the page became my discipline and my assignment every day.

  My writing desk was the solitary table in our tiny fifth-floor walk-up—it only served that purpose when the dishes were cleared, the food put away, and the kids asleep—and my writing time was 4:00 a.m., when the phone was quiet and the hustle-bustle was on a temporary time-out. I’d pull out my backpack and the two canvas totes stored in a corner, spread out my notes, stack up my yellow writing pads, and go to work. I wrote long-hand, the feel of the words at my fingertips, with lots of crossing-out, re-writing, and arrows connecting new sentences and whole paragraphs with older bits, rearranging to make a point or to hear the words harmonizing a bit more clearly. It was cramped quarters to be sure, more than modest, but perfectly magical for three whole hours every morning.

  Bernardine owned a first-generation Remington Electric Typewriter and yet—this is embarrassing—I couldn’t type a word. She set down every line of my dissertation, and corrections were a huge pain. “This is some sexist shit!” she proclaimed early on, smiling patiently. “This joint isn’t Father Knows Best, you know.” She was altogether too generous, but she let me know that I was a jerk in need of some serious rectification.

  BJ encouraged o
veralls for all from the start, work clothes over dresses, sweatshirts not dress shirts. “We’re here to get dirty,” she told parents, “to run and tumble and climb, to explore and get into as many things as we can.” Her own outfit was built for action, and while she didn’t want a uniform exactly, she didn’t want anyone holding back for fear of wear and tear either. “Girls can do anything,” was mantra and guiding principle as well as the title of a favorite and well-worn kids’ book on the shelf.

  When Lou/Bernardine had first come to visit and we all sat down on the floor to talk, she asked BJ how she chose her books for the center. BJ said that she had to rely on donations at that point and so she just took what was offered, never giving the library a second thought—books were books, and the child care was so new that she was focused on learning all she could about kids and kid development. Lou gently nudged her to think a bit about children’s books reflecting our values, our diverse society, dignity for children, antiracist activity, and supporting girls in nontraditional roles. She pointed to a pastel poster on the wall of a little boy with his hand slyly on the behind of a little girl and noted that the poster was teaching that male supremacy was cute. BJ later described that as “my a-ha moment”; the poster was gone the next day. Children’s books became her passion and her project, something she became known for in the early childhood community.

  When she received a greeting card from Bernardine celebrating International Women’s Day, BJ began to construct a large collage on one wall with pictures of women doing everything: a large color photo of the astronaut Sally Ride; Zaida Gonzales, the first female firefighter in New York, posed in front of a red and glistening fire engine; Rosie the Riveter; farmers driving trucks and tractors; pilots, cops, gardeners, and nursing moms in business suits. Families soon began to bring in pictures of their moms and grandmothers and aunts and sisters, working, cooking, singing in a church choir, riding a camel, and the collage became a living thing that grew like Topsy.