Children's Ministry Trauma and English Professors
If it occurs to anybody to wonder why my posts for the last few months have been mostly about children's ministry experiences, the answer is: "Because Sunday is the only day that I'm not working and have time to post." Am I apologetic about filling pages of internet with the life and times of my kids? Um.... no. Why would I be?
Today was traumatic for me. Really. In our room we have four workers and are supposed to be able to collectively handle 12-14 kids.
Today we had 20.
You never realize what a difference the number 6 can make until your units of measurement are two-year-olds. It wasn't that anybody cried much--it was just that most of our kids are boys and, well, you know how that can be.
Samuel and Joel are brothers of apparently similar ages, since they are both in Toddlers 1. Sam is black and Joel is white, and their parents are white, so we gather that Sam is adopted. These two adore each other, call each other "bubba," etc. Which is wonderful. The only problem is that they also roughhouse like brothers, and there's this policy that if at any time a child receives any kind of blow to the head, that child will be removed to the church office and the medical team and the child's parents will be summoned from the main meeting.
So guess who won the award for head-knocks two weeks running? Joel. And guess which two kids have to be pulled apart throughout a given morning? Bingo.
We also had a variety of visitors, which is where the trauma begins. Just before we started sending people to Toddlers 2 and 3 because we had become absolutely full up, we accepted a pair of twin girls: absolutely beautiful Asian babies in red-and-white matching outfits.
The only problem is that apparently these girls would put Attila the Hun to shame. One of them, whose name for the moment escapes me, kept trying to pull a toy away from Case. She is a strong little girl and she wouldn't leave him alone. She backed him into corners, chased him across the room, etc. I pulled them apart a couple of times, but was engaged in separating Sam and Joel (round 34 and still going strong) when IT happened.
I have never seen Case lose it like that. A scream from the other side of the room made me turn around. He had her down on the ground with a strangle-hold on her neck and, as near as I can tell, his teeth pressed into her cheek just below the eye (not biting, thank goodness, but enough to leave a mark). Her face was red and she seemed hardly to be breathing, though I couldn't tell whether that was because of crying, anger, squeezing, or a combination. My general impression is that Case had simply had enough and chose to fight fire with a much bigger fire.
Well, we whisked her down the hall and they called the medical team and her parents and his parents and it all turned out fine, nobody much hurt and all parents quite understanding. But I tell you, it shook me.
I guess I've gotten to the point where I figure I can prevent things like that. From the minute we have a child until the minute we are down to one child, I try hard to be constantly on the alert. I've caught a lot of things as they are developing and prevented a lot of injuries, sure. It's my job. However, I've become overconfident about how many children I can watch at once.
Today a little girl might have been suffocated. Granted, it wasn't my fault--I'm not the room leader and I don't choose when to stop accepting kids. But through the experience I realized that I have limitations and I've been arrogant in assuming that I personally can prevent things like that from happening. I realized all over again the precious charge represented in each child, and it scared me silly to think that one of them might have been seriously hurt on our watch.
I was also, frankly, a little shocked. Case has always been playful and always a wrestler, but I've never seen him go after somebody like that. He was mightily provoked, I know, and frankly my sympathies were in some ways with him. However, that doesn't excuse such violence. I guess we're each capable of murder, even as small children. And that's another kinda traumatic idea.
Come to think of it, trauma of one sort or another has marked this entire week. On Monday it was the trauma of dealing with a situation at work which left me in the end (and PURELY by God's grace) with a satisfactory answer to the problem, but also with sixteen hours lost and a night in which I had 3 hours of sleep (Note for the uninitiated: I never get that little sleep. I simply can't function well on less than 6-6.5 hours).
When it turned out that the problem was solved and the moms were happy again, I went around dancing and singing all day Wednesday. Nevertheless, Monday and Tuesday were heavy days both in terms of workload and in terms of bearing emotional and mental burdens. In fact, Brittainy and I worked most nights last week and I can't remember feeling really lighthearted except on Wednesday and late last night.
Mix into all this the trauma experienced this week by three former students of mine: my younger sister and two others, who at the collective ages of sixteen, seventeen, and seventeen are attending college classes for the first time.
Let me rephrase that: in particular they are attending an English 101 class taught by a twenty-six-year-old graduate student who happily accepts slang in papers written for his class "because slang is a legitimate form of self-expression," and seems to adhere to a theory of language which I can only describe as relativistic-existentialist. In other words, he is a non-Christian muddling along through life and language theory without God. His situation arouses my compassion, just as his ideas arouse my interest, if by "interest" we understand "intellectual stimulation and heightened awareness of the issue."
He left Jack, Tarra, and Marjorie exceedingly puzzled--not shaken in their faith, just puzzled--and turning to me for answers, since I was briefly their Lit teacher. I'm still in the process of sorting out their professor's worldview from secondhand accounts and trying to explain, especially to Jack, about semiotics (their professor spent time on this term during their first class) and the relationships between sound-patterns, meanings, relative truth, absolute truth, and society, all from a biblical perspective. Phew!
Marjorie, especially, is rising to the challenge of demonstrating her faith in a secular environment. I'm all kinds of proud of her, but at the same time I recognize the difficult tight-wire that she will have to walk. I shall be on the edge of my seat to see how she gets on in this English class particularly, and to know more about this professor's ideas, especially if I'm going to be placed opposite him as a kind of apologist for Christian language-theory.
Apparently he freely admitted to his students that he doesn't enjoy teaching English 101. I hope very much for their sakes that he will eventually begin to teach them writing and leave the semiotics alone. Not that I think it's bad for them to wrestle with these questions---just that I'd like them to get a little practical skill out of this class as well as a challenged worldview.
SO, all in all, it has been a very interesting week. I'm hoping that next week will be significantly less interesting, but, to paraphrase the ancient Greeks, "that lies in the lap of God."
Today was traumatic for me. Really. In our room we have four workers and are supposed to be able to collectively handle 12-14 kids.
Today we had 20.
You never realize what a difference the number 6 can make until your units of measurement are two-year-olds. It wasn't that anybody cried much--it was just that most of our kids are boys and, well, you know how that can be.
Samuel and Joel are brothers of apparently similar ages, since they are both in Toddlers 1. Sam is black and Joel is white, and their parents are white, so we gather that Sam is adopted. These two adore each other, call each other "bubba," etc. Which is wonderful. The only problem is that they also roughhouse like brothers, and there's this policy that if at any time a child receives any kind of blow to the head, that child will be removed to the church office and the medical team and the child's parents will be summoned from the main meeting.
So guess who won the award for head-knocks two weeks running? Joel. And guess which two kids have to be pulled apart throughout a given morning? Bingo.
We also had a variety of visitors, which is where the trauma begins. Just before we started sending people to Toddlers 2 and 3 because we had become absolutely full up, we accepted a pair of twin girls: absolutely beautiful Asian babies in red-and-white matching outfits.
The only problem is that apparently these girls would put Attila the Hun to shame. One of them, whose name for the moment escapes me, kept trying to pull a toy away from Case. She is a strong little girl and she wouldn't leave him alone. She backed him into corners, chased him across the room, etc. I pulled them apart a couple of times, but was engaged in separating Sam and Joel (round 34 and still going strong) when IT happened.
I have never seen Case lose it like that. A scream from the other side of the room made me turn around. He had her down on the ground with a strangle-hold on her neck and, as near as I can tell, his teeth pressed into her cheek just below the eye (not biting, thank goodness, but enough to leave a mark). Her face was red and she seemed hardly to be breathing, though I couldn't tell whether that was because of crying, anger, squeezing, or a combination. My general impression is that Case had simply had enough and chose to fight fire with a much bigger fire.
Well, we whisked her down the hall and they called the medical team and her parents and his parents and it all turned out fine, nobody much hurt and all parents quite understanding. But I tell you, it shook me.
I guess I've gotten to the point where I figure I can prevent things like that. From the minute we have a child until the minute we are down to one child, I try hard to be constantly on the alert. I've caught a lot of things as they are developing and prevented a lot of injuries, sure. It's my job. However, I've become overconfident about how many children I can watch at once.
Today a little girl might have been suffocated. Granted, it wasn't my fault--I'm not the room leader and I don't choose when to stop accepting kids. But through the experience I realized that I have limitations and I've been arrogant in assuming that I personally can prevent things like that from happening. I realized all over again the precious charge represented in each child, and it scared me silly to think that one of them might have been seriously hurt on our watch.
I was also, frankly, a little shocked. Case has always been playful and always a wrestler, but I've never seen him go after somebody like that. He was mightily provoked, I know, and frankly my sympathies were in some ways with him. However, that doesn't excuse such violence. I guess we're each capable of murder, even as small children. And that's another kinda traumatic idea.
Come to think of it, trauma of one sort or another has marked this entire week. On Monday it was the trauma of dealing with a situation at work which left me in the end (and PURELY by God's grace) with a satisfactory answer to the problem, but also with sixteen hours lost and a night in which I had 3 hours of sleep (Note for the uninitiated: I never get that little sleep. I simply can't function well on less than 6-6.5 hours).
When it turned out that the problem was solved and the moms were happy again, I went around dancing and singing all day Wednesday. Nevertheless, Monday and Tuesday were heavy days both in terms of workload and in terms of bearing emotional and mental burdens. In fact, Brittainy and I worked most nights last week and I can't remember feeling really lighthearted except on Wednesday and late last night.
Mix into all this the trauma experienced this week by three former students of mine: my younger sister and two others, who at the collective ages of sixteen, seventeen, and seventeen are attending college classes for the first time.
Let me rephrase that: in particular they are attending an English 101 class taught by a twenty-six-year-old graduate student who happily accepts slang in papers written for his class "because slang is a legitimate form of self-expression," and seems to adhere to a theory of language which I can only describe as relativistic-existentialist. In other words, he is a non-Christian muddling along through life and language theory without God. His situation arouses my compassion, just as his ideas arouse my interest, if by "interest" we understand "intellectual stimulation and heightened awareness of the issue."
He left Jack, Tarra, and Marjorie exceedingly puzzled--not shaken in their faith, just puzzled--and turning to me for answers, since I was briefly their Lit teacher. I'm still in the process of sorting out their professor's worldview from secondhand accounts and trying to explain, especially to Jack, about semiotics (their professor spent time on this term during their first class) and the relationships between sound-patterns, meanings, relative truth, absolute truth, and society, all from a biblical perspective. Phew!
Marjorie, especially, is rising to the challenge of demonstrating her faith in a secular environment. I'm all kinds of proud of her, but at the same time I recognize the difficult tight-wire that she will have to walk. I shall be on the edge of my seat to see how she gets on in this English class particularly, and to know more about this professor's ideas, especially if I'm going to be placed opposite him as a kind of apologist for Christian language-theory.
Apparently he freely admitted to his students that he doesn't enjoy teaching English 101. I hope very much for their sakes that he will eventually begin to teach them writing and leave the semiotics alone. Not that I think it's bad for them to wrestle with these questions---just that I'd like them to get a little practical skill out of this class as well as a challenged worldview.
SO, all in all, it has been a very interesting week. I'm hoping that next week will be significantly less interesting, but, to paraphrase the ancient Greeks, "that lies in the lap of God."
posted by Praelucor at 4:50 PM
2 Comments:
Oh, fascinating. I mean especially about the English professor. I've gotten to aid and abet an English student here too--she's going to the community college--and so far it's been grand fun. I don't think her professor is a frustrated lit theorist, but I also don't think English is her first language. So I get to coach to my heart's content. :-)
I LOVE explaining commas and metaphors to intelligent people! I refer to Strunk and White frequently...
Taking care of kids in Sunday School - always fun. Last fall while I was helping on Cyrano, I was also on Sunday evenings in sole charge of around seven small children. We didn't really have rules or a set curriculum; the older kids could memorize a Bible verse over time, while the little ones didn't even understand when I tried to tell a simple story. So it was a combination of duck-duck-goose, singing, telling Bible stories, and crawling under tables in damage control. hehe. Eventually, I learned to cope by making them all my "helpers" and giving each one something to do. That usually worked OK.
Anyway, I wouldn't worry myself about the kids. They're tough. And they may be marvelous little miracles, but they're also marvelous little sinners. ;)
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