children, culturally and personally; books that stretched them and opened them to different or unfamiliar cultures and situations as well.
My favorite books were the ones the kids made themselves, stories they dictated to an adult and then illustrated and bound. We had a vast collection about families, pets, monsters, baby sisters, grandparents, trips to the zoo or the museum, space travel and hospitals. One of my most beloved homemade jobs was an ABC book that BJ had developed by gathering the invented toddler-talk all around us into a compilation that arguably improved on the original words in several instances: N is for Nosey, a noun—those hardened bits of dirt and mucous one picks from the nose; B is for Blurries, a noun—sudden bursts of wind-driven blinding snow; R is for Repulsicans, a noun—it’s the party of Ronald Reagan!
Over time BJ and I developed our own working early childhood education philosophy; we hatched as well a little set of grounded theories about kids, conclusions about how they grew and what they needed, coalescing in the middle of the muddle of our mish-mash classroom. We hadn’t read or heard about any of this, and our observations were not confirmed for us by any research or authoritative sources whatsoever—but we thought putting a toddler in a walker was a form of abuse, asking a little kid to tell what a painting depicted a kind of censorship, and telling a child not to be angry a pathway to neurosis. As BJ would say, “If it’s not true, I’ll eat my shirt.”
One mid-morning the front bell rang unexpectedly, and in swept Eva Wolfson from the New York City Department of Health—someone had ratted out BJ for running an unlicensed child-care center, and suddenly there was the distinct whiff of danger at the door. Eva was short and tough with BJ, reading her the riot act in her crisply accented voice, and the conclusion was both quick and apparently foregone: the place was substandard, second-rate, out of compliance, and would be “closed by order of the New York City Department of Health.” The phrase evoked images of filthy kitchens and infestations of vermin—I wouldn’t want to eat at any joint that had been “closed by order of the New York City Department of Health”—and the words themselves were tragically definitive and carried the chilling ring of irrevocability.
BJ’s Kids was spontaneously, naturally homemade, and, of course, an uneasy fit with rules, straight lines, orderly regulations, or city codes. On that first visit Eva checked off the contradictions: improper files and inadequate record-keeping, sloppy documentation of attendance, unacceptable kitchen and bathroom sinks, no approved governors on the hot water faucets, insufficient square footage, inappropriate staffing, and no fully certified teacher. After she left and the kids went down for their naps, BJ cried for two hours, flattened momentarily. She didn’t stay down for long.
By that evening BJ, who looked so mild and unassuming hours before, had organized a campaign to save the center that would have made Patton proud. Parents were mobilized, politicians contacted, and an elaborate media strategy launched. Ken Auletta visited BJ’s Kids a few days later and wrote a column for the
Daily News
entitled “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” and both BJ and Eva were suddenly famous.
Thus began a complicated association. Eva was smart and capable and even, once she dropped that brusque bureaucratic pose, a good mentor for BJ; for her part, BJ was willing to learn and to search for the common ground between dream and reality. The swords were sheathed.
And within it all was an odd unintended consequence for me as well. I returned to school seeking certification as an early childhood teacher after fifteen years away from the classroom, to the Bank Street College of Education—a perfect fit, it turned out—where I would earn a master’s degree.
I’d left college with a vengeance and vowed to
My favorite books were the ones the kids made themselves, stories they dictated to an adult and then illustrated and bound. We had a vast collection about families, pets, monsters, baby sisters, grandparents, trips to the zoo or the museum, space travel and hospitals. One of my most beloved homemade jobs was an ABC book that BJ had developed by gathering the invented toddler-talk all around us into a compilation that arguably improved on the original words in several instances: N is for Nosey, a noun—those hardened bits of dirt and mucous one picks from the nose; B is for Blurries, a noun—sudden bursts of wind-driven blinding snow; R is for Repulsicans, a noun—it’s the party of Ronald Reagan!
Over time BJ and I developed our own working early childhood education philosophy; we hatched as well a little set of grounded theories about kids, conclusions about how they grew and what they needed, coalescing in the middle of the muddle of our mish-mash classroom. We hadn’t read or heard about any of this, and our observations were not confirmed for us by any research or authoritative sources whatsoever—but we thought putting a toddler in a walker was a form of abuse, asking a little kid to tell what a painting depicted a kind of censorship, and telling a child not to be angry a pathway to neurosis. As BJ would say, “If it’s not true, I’ll eat my shirt.”
One mid-morning the front bell rang unexpectedly, and in swept Eva Wolfson from the New York City Department of Health—someone had ratted out BJ for running an unlicensed child-care center, and suddenly there was the distinct whiff of danger at the door. Eva was short and tough with BJ, reading her the riot act in her crisply accented voice, and the conclusion was both quick and apparently foregone: the place was substandard, second-rate, out of compliance, and would be “closed by order of the New York City Department of Health.” The phrase evoked images of filthy kitchens and infestations of vermin—I wouldn’t want to eat at any joint that had been “closed by order of the New York City Department of Health”—and the words themselves were tragically definitive and carried the chilling ring of irrevocability.
BJ’s Kids was spontaneously, naturally homemade, and, of course, an uneasy fit with rules, straight lines, orderly regulations, or city codes. On that first visit Eva checked off the contradictions: improper files and inadequate record-keeping, sloppy documentation of attendance, unacceptable kitchen and bathroom sinks, no approved governors on the hot water faucets, insufficient square footage, inappropriate staffing, and no fully certified teacher. After she left and the kids went down for their naps, BJ cried for two hours, flattened momentarily. She didn’t stay down for long.
By that evening BJ, who looked so mild and unassuming hours before, had organized a campaign to save the center that would have made Patton proud. Parents were mobilized, politicians contacted, and an elaborate media strategy launched. Ken Auletta visited BJ’s Kids a few days later and wrote a column for the
Daily News
entitled “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” and both BJ and Eva were suddenly famous.
Thus began a complicated association. Eva was smart and capable and even, once she dropped that brusque bureaucratic pose, a good mentor for BJ; for her part, BJ was willing to learn and to search for the common ground between dream and reality. The swords were sheathed.
And within it all was an odd unintended consequence for me as well. I returned to school seeking certification as an early childhood teacher after fifteen years away from the classroom, to the Bank Street College of Education—a perfect fit, it turned out—where I would earn a master’s degree.
I’d left college with a vengeance and vowed to
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