The children in Ms. Martin’s third grade class seem restless as they make their way in from art class. “Put your things away,” Ms. Martin says, “and sit in your assigned seats.”
Jaziel slides over to me and asks, “Have you even ate breakfast?”
I smile at him and nod, then gesture toward the rug where Ms. Martin is sitting in her teaching chair. “It’s time for read-aloud,” she announces, “so when I call your number, come to your rug square.”
“I never get breakfast,” Jaziel continues, edging closer. He points to a cardboard box in the corner of the room. The box is labeled, “Breakfast” in permanent marker. “I didn’t get time,” he tells me.
“This is your second chance!” Ms. Martin’s voice gets louder. “We’re silent now. If I have to talk again, you’ll owe me recess. So give me a voice level zero.”
At the word “recess,” most of the kids seem to settle. Jaziel walks to the rug circuitously, peering into the Breakfast box on his way. Once he sits to listen to the story, which Ms. Martin reads from her iphone, I walk over to peek in the box as well. It is filled with French toast sticks, cinnamon-flavored, in grab’n’go bags. Jaziel is watching me, I notice, so I sit down and try to tune in to the book, too.
Clio Stearns is Assistant Professor of Education at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, MA. She teaches classroom management and other foundational elementary education courses and supervises student teachers. Her scholarship focuses on affect in classroom life, the relationship between emotion and behavior in childhood, and on how some psychoanalytic theory can help us understand children’s and teachers’ experiences in school. Currently, she is involved in a research project about consent in the childhood classroom.