who is the teacher here anyway?

so today . . . i was tired, i was swamped, i wanted to be home in bed. but i also wanted a paycheck, so i was at school.

i arrive at school at 8:00. technically school starts at 9:00, so for the first hour of my day i mostly greet arriving children and parents while monitoring other children playing. usually i am sitting at a table surrounded by children coloring, cutting, taping, and stapling (which they LOVE to do!) while others are building with legos, playing with kitchen stuff, and building roadways. the interesting thing to me is that, most mornings it is pretty much the same group of children doing the same things, but some days the room looks like a disaster area and takes awhile to clean up, and other days we get cleaned up in just a few minutes. either way, clean up time always requires some teacher intervention. generally this takes the form of verbal encouragement--"i see joshua is cleaning up . . . i see kristen is putting her crayons away . . . luca is being a good helper . . . i see vicki is helping her friend pick up legos . . . "

i think i am pretty good at my job most days. but today, even though my body was where it was supposed to be, my brain was not in the game. so when clean-up time came, i found that i wasn't quite ready myself--i had more "teacher stuff" to do, but it was 8:55, so i announced, "ok, it's time to clean up," and then started cleaning up my own area.

pretty soon i heard a little voice saying, "good job joshua . . i like the way patrick is picking up the kitchen things . . . catherine is being a good helper . . . " and it wasn't my voice! i looked around, and there was megan, calling out encouragement to her classmates as they cleaned up.

it was one of those moments that i hope i never forget.

i love megan. i think she is a wonderful little girl, but many times she is in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing. she doesn't mean to--she just usually has a different agenda than her teacher. but since i am not technically her teacher, i am free to just enjoy her for who she is. and today she had my back. when she realized i was too preoccupied with other things to encourage the kids during clean up time, she did it.

megan is going to be a force. one day she may rule the world. but even if she doesn't, i think she is going to make it a better place!