CHRISTMAS PARTY DAYS
HENEVER I find myself at a Free Kindergarten Christmas Party-which I did recently-I am amazed at the patience and understanding. brought to bear in this training of very small children. I have watched and listened pretty closely, and have come to the conclusion that this experience brings out the very best-or the worst-in the trainee. There are no half-measures with children. Either you like them, or you don’t. Added to which, of course, the child is as instinctively wise as an animal-you might as well try play-acting on your dog. Self-control and honeyed words are more than useless here. You don’t like the little brats? Very wellresults nil. Simply, nothing happens. But if you do? Why, they unfold before your very eyes. 2 And there are other things you’ll-find, not just handy, but necessary. Things that are not just "come by." For instance, you'll want
both kinds of imagination, the one that goes with a sense of the dramatic and the deeper all-discerning one that is a sensitiveness of the spirit. What strikes one at these parties is that the babies are always serenely happy-un-selfconscious, and therefore at their best. Every action is carried out with an absorbed delight. The teacher is ageless-a helper, a friend, a playmate, almost a mother. One cannot help wishing that this easy camaraderie could exist more universally between pupil and teacher at Primary Schools, That it doesn’t is very often due to the hopelessly large classes-forty, fifty and more -placed in the charge of one_ individual. With the best heart in the world a teacher must fail to keep the interest and enthusiasm of such an unwieldy battalion. The other reason is, of course, that teachers are born and not made.
KAY
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 26, 22 December 1939, Page 42
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291CHRISTMAS PARTY DAYS New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 26, 22 December 1939, Page 42
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