For the week of September 18 - 24, 2002

The crooked rainbow

Commentary by JoELLEN COLLINS

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When I returned to the world of small children and dedicated teachers this semester, I was reminded of the joys and anguish of working with kids. Over the months I was on leave from my position, I had missed the affection, the shy smiles, the daily "hellos" of the elementary students in my school. I welcomed my resumption of duties in a small office, the multitudinous chores of managing many of the tasks involved with being an assistant to the director of my division. I anticipated with joy the renewed friendships with my fellow staff members and with the parents of the children I might bandage or comfort from time to time. All in all, I delighted in being back at work.

I jumped in, realizing I had forgotten how many little things there are to finish before the first day of school. So when I needed to update one of the entry hall bulletin boards, I eagerly accepted the help offered by a couple of middle-school students. Since the previous board had consisted of a background of rainbow panels in all the correct hues, I told the girls to try to emulate the pretty display. Several minutes later, they showed me the colored arcs of rainbow they had cut out of bright construction paper. I gave them a stapler and they began to put them on the empty space of the board. After some time, while I was in my office involved in sorting emergency forms, one of the girls approached me and stood quietly by my desk. I looked up and smiled. She told me they had stapled the pieces on in a slightly different order than before, and couldn’t figure out how to make them fit in a normal rainbow progression of colors. They left, and I went out of my office to examine the result of their help. There, in resplendent glory, was a Picasso rainbow, a crooked and askew melange of colored panels. Perhaps, I thought, these were vivid mountains rather than a rainbow. I loved the result.

My first instinct was to redo the board and make it look like the first one. However, the more I looked at it, the more I realized that the final product was just right. The crooked rainbow represents the realities of life in education. We live in an imperfect world, and learning to accept the off-center results of our attempts at perfection is a good start in growing up. The spontaneity of child art is undeniable, yet how many times do we overpraise a child’s keeping in the lines, rather than note an exuberance of brush strokes? How many of us have stifled an urge to sing in public because someone told us we had a less than perfect voice? How many times a day do we repeat the belittling words of what I call my Jiminy Cricket, the voice of condemnation that sits on my shoulder? That creature often lets me know that I have failed in some small way, that I am certainly not perfect, that, indeed, I create crooked rainbows in much that I do.

I naturally condemn the criticism that we dole out to projects that fall short of perfection. However, as a former California high school English teacher, I dealt with the overuse of the philosophy that we should primarily nurture self-esteem and avoid any negative feedback. In the context of serving "self-esteem" to the point where English teachers were mandated to use yellow stickies for composition correcting, I rebelled. I do firmly believe that real pride and self-esteem often come from tackling something new, learning difficult skills, and moving into more complex tasks. I always wrote lengthy comments on student compositions, pointing out the paper’s positive qualities along with constructive criticism. Yellow stickies made that job harder.

So even though I am a bit old-fashioned in my desire that people (even sportscasters) use our beautiful language in the best way possible, and lean towards perfectionism in my own usage, in other aspects of my life I have learned to welcome crooked rainbows. So my drawers don’t contain items folded in military fashion? That’s a crooked rainbow I no longer feel guilty about creating. I have more time for things I really love to do. So my mother taught me to always make my bed for fear that a visitor would think me a slob? Well, now I can just fluff up the duvet and toss the pillows (although I still do so, obsessively, the minute I get out of bed.) How many visitors head immediately to that part of my home anyway, those imagined white-gloved inspectors of the baseboards of clean abodes? Even Martha Stewart (herself revealed as quite less than perfect) might not judge me negatively.

So being around children refreshes one in many ways. The less-than-perfect exuberance of children should be cherished. At public meetings, I have heard people express alarm at the possibility of living near the "noise" created by the playground sounds of children. Those decibels are music to my ears. One cannot be around children without opening up to the little intrusions of offbeat ideas, of fresh perceptions. We live in a world threatened by the perfection of weapons worked to the most exact requirements of destruction, creations of pinpoint accuracy. I opt for crooked rainbows.

 

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.