Second First Day of School

Off to school, first day...again

I don't know what the phenomenon is called - the one where you search afar for something good only to find you're sitting on it - but I've had the experience. This morning. At 9:00 Briana and I turned up for her second first day of school at a kindergarten right here in Lupeni. When our collegue and good friend Ilie reported that his 4 year old son wrote love notes to his teacher during his off-school hours, I figured this was enough solid evidence to give another kindergarten a try. (I couldn't imagine any of Briana's previous classmates writing love notes to their teacher.) We spent 3 hours in Doamna Mariana G.'s classroom and both of us were in love too. The class is a bit cold and there isn't as much formal instructional time ("That's the kindergarten where they don't really learn much," commented a friend - no workbooks, no homework, no number or letter testing), but under Doamna Mariana's calm and humored care I can see these 25 little ones learning the things hardest to teach. She is comfortable not being in total control of each of her pupils every second (there is a healthy amount of running about and tunneling under desks), she reasons with them reasonably, asks them to speak to each other when there is a conflict, lights a candle when they pray before their snacktime :) , and can spin a yarn so fantastically that I was spellbound for 20 minutes and wasn't at all surprised when the children could answer every listening-comprehension question asked at the end. She doesn't make any child do anything - some choose to play with trucks rather than join the circle of crawling kittens and bouncing balls - but most of them choose to join in because she's so much fun and she's so non-threatening. I may recant after more experiences - cynic! - but it looks like we've found our place. I can already see Briana turning 13 and Doamna Mariana calling me aside, "Don't you think it's time she moved on?"