I’m a preschool teacher, and I’m doing parent-teacher conferences. I am meeting with the parents of a student who attends sporadically. I show them her portfolio.

Me: “[Student] does really well when she attends regularly, but she struggles when she doesn’t attend for a while. I’m afraid that if she continues to struggle, she won’t be ready for kindergarten next year.”

Dad: “Wait. What? What do you mean, ‘when she attends regularly’? She’s coming every day.” *Turns to look at his wife* “She is attending every day, right?”

Mom doesn’t say anything, so I hand Dad his daughter’s attendance sheet.

Dad: “What the h***, [Mom]? Why are we paying hundreds of dollars a month if you’re not even going to bring her in?!”

[Student] was then dropped off by her dad for the rest of the year. I can happily say she caught up quickly and was ready for kindergarten at the end of the school year.

I learned how to read before preschool, so when I was around four or five. If I remember it correctly, I was the only child in preschool that could read. Once a day, we sat down in a circle to sing. Every day, a kid got to pick the song by pulling a card out of a stack of ten, completely at random if you couldn’t read the lyrics on the back. When my turn was up, I quickly read the lyrics and then picked my favorite song. My teacher lost it and yelled at me in front of everyone.

Teacher #1: “You can’t do that! It’s unfair and it’s cheating!”

I was sent to timeout and wasn’t allowed to play with the rest of the kids in the “activity room”.

In first or second grade, we had a book to read. Our homework was usually to read a few pages of that book. I was bored at my afterschool care because the other kids were several years younger, so I read the entire book. Of course, this teacher also lost it and yelled at me.

Teacher #2: “Don’t read ahead! Reading ahead gives you an unfair advantage over the other kids!”

In fifth grade, our teacher gave the entire class a challenge. After reading a book, we were encouraged to write a short review and stick it to the classroom wall. If we wrote enough reviews to make it around the entire room, she’d prepare a surprise for us at the end of the year. Guess what? The teacher got mad because I read too much — three or four books a week — and told me that my book reviews didn’t count.

Looking back, I find it sad that none of these teachers just gave me extra books or assignments, when it was obvious that I enjoy reading. Instead, they actively tried to stop me from reading.

Luckily, none of this dissuaded me from enjoying reading!

When I was young, my mom picked me up at my preschool, but after taking me to the car, realized she needed to talk to the teachers about something. I didn’t want to go back in, so she told me I could stay in the car for a minute while she ran to ask my teachers a quick question so long as I promised not to leave the car.

Excited to be alone, I immediately headed up to the front seat and pretended to drive, as any young kid would do. I pushed all the buttons and pulled all the levers I could find, and one of those was the parking brake. Somehow, I successfully pulled it while playing, not realizing that it did something even when the car was parked. The next thing I knew, the car went rolling backward down the hill the parking lot was on.

It only rolled a little way before coming to a stop — we weren’t on that steep a hill — but I was still scared. Not wanting to be caught, I immediately crawled back into the back seat and buckled myself in, hoping no one would notice.

My mom seemed to take forever to come back out while I waited anxiously. In fact, she did come out almost immediately, but I’d rolled far enough back that she could no longer see the car behind the daycare building. She had run back in to ask for help when she thought the car and I were stolen before eventually coming far enough out to see where the car had rolled to.

She came and freaked out when she saw me nearly crying from worry. I tried to play it off as if the car had always been where it was and I didn’t know why she was concerned, not that she bought that for a second.

Luckily for me, she was so thankful I was okay that she didn’t care enough to punish me. And besides, I technically never did leave the car, as promised! However, it was quite a while before I was trusted to be alone in a car again.

My cousin used to work as a nursery school teacher. Her own son was one of the students in her class, and when he was about one year old, a parent wandered by the classroom, where my cousin happened to be breastfeeding her son at that moment. [Parent] looked around the room of maybe a dozen or so infants, confused.

Parent: “Do you… do that for all of the babies?”

My cousin had a good laugh about the parent’s misconception that part of her teaching duties included personally breastfeeding all of the babies.

It is spring 2004. A species of cicada emerges as adults every seventeen years in the Washington, DC area — DC, Northern Virginia, and Maryland.  

They are everywhere: trees, buildings, roads. And they make an eerie sound because of the billions of them that are trying to find a mate at the same time. When they emerge, they come out of the ground in their nymph stage, dry out, and then molt their exoskeleton one last time. Once they’ve mated, they lay their eggs in the outer twig-like branches of trees. In doing so, the egg takes its nutrition from the tree, killing off the outer twelve inches or so of every branch of the tree.

So, all of the Hitchcockian effects of this insect: little mounds of dirt where each cicada emerges, discarded exoskeletons, cicadas flying everywhere, eerie sound, and many trees’ outer branches dying off.

During this time, I’ve headed to my daughter’s preschool, which is a Montessori school. They’ve taken it upon themselves to make this Biblical insect plague a teachable moment. I’m walking up to the front of the school to check my daughter out for the day. I hear the playful squeals of kids in the back playground. But one little girl, about four years old, is standing out front, looking intently at something in her hands.

The girl holds up her hands to me, showing me the dried leaving of a cicada’s molt, and says, “Look, mister. An exo-skeleton!”

“Why yes,” I say. “That’s exactly right!”

It’s great that instead of being afraid, this girl and all her classmates now have a better appreciation of nature.

This story was featured in our May 2020 roundup!

Click here to read the next story!

Click here to go back to the roundup!