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 This school year I am trying to keep foremost in my mind that I am dealing with kids. Children who are in the earliest stages of building a personality and becoming people with all the attendant worries and concerns of adults without the experience to put them into context. At our first day of in-service training this year, my colleagues and I considered the relative difficulty we all have moving through a room. The example given was a cocktail party, but any social situation would do. Where do we stand? Do we make eye contact? How do we get from here to there without bumping or scraping past anyone else's personal bubble? Suddenly, all those frustrated insistences that I have made as a teacher for eight year olds to "just line up" fell into sharp relief. 

Or lack thereof. 

I can remember being a kid and being terrified of where I might end up. Please don't sit me next to Melvin. He picks his nose, and I am just starting to move past the realm of nose-pickers into just that round kid. And not by Marie. She's mean and sneaky, and I am years away from understanding that Marie might have been expressing some latent affection for me. I just don't want to get hurt. Emotionally or physically. And almost certainly if I end up next to Mia, I will never hear the end of how we are sitting in a tree, spelling out the word "kissing." I could not live through that. Can't I please just sit next to Todd and Ron and Warren for the rest of my life? I know how this works. I do not need my comfort zone expanded. 

Or at least that is what I believed back in fourth grade. So now when I encounter a nine year old in the hallway of my school insisting that he or she cannot possibly go back into their classroom, I bring some empathy along. Of course I also have fifty years of hard-won experience that suggests that Ron and Todd and Warren will eventually grow up and away from me, and I will seek out the relative comfort of playing "horses" with the girls on a somewhat frequent basis rather than subject myself to the pain and ridicule of being inept at most organized sports. I encourage them to talk about how they are feeling, weeding through the excuses about their sore foot or how mean their teacher is. There could be a rock in their shoe, and it's a pretty sure bet that their teacher has lost patience with simply corralling twenty-four fourth graders into a circle to discuss the day's events. How hard could that be? Just sit down on the carpet. Really. 

Except that Sophia is sitting right there, and nobody is exactly sure if she will be a Mia or a Marie. Getting punched or getting kissed? Or just having other kids talking about it at recess even if neither one ever happened? Where is the sanctuary?

I don't have the heart to tell him that I am fifty-nine years old and I still haven't found it.