the mud

Last week I said ‘So Long’ to what was my first class of my own students in a very long time.  The boys looked a little more nervous than excited about the summer awaiting them, not as confident as their fifth grade counterparts who knew what summer held for them.  The first graders have quickly forgotten what it’s like to be a child again for the summer.  The school routine quickly takes over their lives and they adjust and assume that this is what it means to be ‘big.’  It’s what we teach them from an early age – ‘ so big!’ we say with smiling faces and great anticipation, yearning for the time when they are so big and can do more things for themselves, can go to school, can tie their shoes, can write, can draw, can put their clothes on by themselves .  This is what we tell them, and this is what we tell ourselves.  That they will be big and that we will have five minutes of peace.  So the boys learn to be so big, doing and keeping cadence with a rhythm not of their own making, fo