Start with the T
In the first summer of my retirement, I volunteered to be a teacher’s helper for one hour. The kindergarten class was a miniature United Nations. A little Muslim girl with bright eyes peeking out from beneath a headscarf waved her 5-year old arms along with all the others. Thirteen little ones in Ms. Hill’s class clearly were having more fun jiggling themselves into contortions than remembering the letter shapes they were trying to imitate. The A, B, C video came to an end and the teacher introduced me first to the bright-eyed little one presented as my assignment. She could barely contain her excitement about being chosen to have special attention on this day.
My task was to review the alphabet, showing how to trace and draw capitals and then lowercase letters. Each erasable page in the booklet sported a picture designed to make this easy. “Apple” for “A.” “Bat” for “B.” “Cat” for “C.” Seemed pretty straight forward. So we began. My new friend pulled up her tiny chair and watched me closely, studying my every move and fascinated by my bracelets. She had one too. We opened the book to the first page with the apple.
I said, “Do you know what this letter is?
She smiled with a glint of recognition in her eyes and quickly said, “Yes.”
I was thrilled. “What is it?” I said.
Without hesitation she replied, “T.”
I gently corrected, carefully introducing the notion that this was actually “A.” We repeated the letter twice, she drew it in the book, she looked at the picture and we turned the page. The same routine followed on the second page that pictured a bat.
“Do you know what this letter is?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. …. “T.”
With delighted confidence, my young friend just knew she was right. I corrected her again. By the time we got to the page with the dog and the letter “D”, I realized we had a pattern. Every letter I asked her about, she saw as “T.” No matter how many times I reviewed the actual letter and she repeated it or I recited the name and she copied it or I pointed to the symbol and she named the connected picture … it always was “T.”
My frustration was greater than hers since finding a solution seemed impossible and she was completely oblivious to any problem. I thought I’d tried everything. Then inadvertently, I glanced at the slip of paper the teacher had given me when I first arrived. Carefully printed on the sheet was the little girl’s name --Tarteil. Why of course! It made perfect sense that she, in her 5-year old wisdom, had learned the first letter of her own name. At this point, I skipped through the alphabet and went directly to the page with the picture of the turtle and the letter “T”. This one was a winner. When I asked the question once again, she answered with eyes still bright and full of hope.
“Do you know what this letter is?”
“Yes. T.”
We laughed together and wrote the letter and moved back to the beginning. Finally, when I pointed to the apple, she recognized “A.”
It was a reminder to me of what I knew and had forgotten about good teaching: No matter what your plans, no matter what your strategies, no matter what you want, you must always begin where they are. It works.