Careful what you say

There is not much I remember about kindergarten. I do not remember my teacher’s name. I do not remember the other children. I do not remember the classroom. I do not remember the activities or lessons of that first year in school. Within all of this haze, I have one very clear memory. It is a memory that seems trivial, and one that I am sure my teacher from that time has no reason to recollect. It is, however, something that has stuck with me for over 30 years.
We were, apparently, learning our addresses in class. Each student had been given a picture of a house, and we were instructed to write our house number by the door, and to color the house on the picture to look like the house that we lived in. I carefully wrote the numbers 1-9-6 next to the door on the picture, and triumphantly brought my paper to my teacher. She looked at the paper discerningly, and told me that I wasn’t yet finished. I was confused, so she told me that I needed to color the picture of the house. My answer to this was simple, “I live in a white house.”
I assume that my teacher had no other activities planned for the next fifteen minutes or so, because she told me to take the picture back to my seat and to “just color the house a different color.” I was dejected and confused, but I did what I was told. I sat, fighting back tears, and colored my house pink. But, in my five year old mind, and to this day, this was not a picture of my house.
As I said before, this memory has never left me. It has, however, been a lesson to me about how not to trivialize children’s ideas and feelings. Children feel deeply, and their ideas are strong – but it is easy, as an adult, to consider this unimportant.
I believe that, in order for children to become successful adults, they need to feel that they are worthy and capable. Self-esteem is more important to success than reading, writing or math. If a child feels they can learn and succeed, then they will. If they are made to feel that they are trivial and without ability – they will have very little chance of learning.
I work with preschool age children. The part of my job I view as being most important is listening to what the children have to say, enjoying their original thoughts and ideas, and praising the effort that they put forth. I do not want to cause any child in my care to hold onto a memory of being told that something they took pride in was not good enough.

http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/showarticle/2425 - 52k

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/28/magazine/how-to-foster-self-esteem.html - 42k