Blog post

            With every passing week at Tunbridge, I feel myself getting more comfortable and familiar with the kids, and I can tell they recognize and remember me too.  Despite always being called “Emma” which is not close to my name. (Whoever Emma is, if she volunteers there, must be a pretty cool person in these kids eyes!).

            This past week I worked with the preschoolers again, but this time was different than the first, I felt like I fit in with the kids more and they were able to enjoy my presence more too.

I volunteer at the after school time, so not having a structured activity to do with them was a struggle at first, but this week I think I found out that a preschooler’s favorite game is hide-and-seek. Despite having 2 semi quality hiding spots in the small playground courtyard, the kids were constantly overjoyed to start the next round. We probably played for almost 1.5 hours.

            Their adoration for this game along with their endurance to play forever, reminded me of the two kids in Countee Cullen’s poem Tableau. Although the premises of her poem is that children don’t know race or understand it and it is something that is learned and developed into adults, I still feel like you can connect the basic innocence, simplicity and naivety of children. Both seem unware of the outside world and thoughts of adults. The boys in the poem don’t know the adults are talking or staring, they are simply enjoying “the golden splendor of the day/ the sable pride of night”. They just want to have fun in the moment. As for the children at Tunbridge, they don’t know that the average adult would not play hide-and-seek for an hour and a half with two hiding spots that would get you found in no more than 30 seconds. They didn’t know that I avoided the spot they hid in every time to let them feel like they were great hiders. They too just wanted to have fun and as long as the game was still entertaining they kept playing.

            As usual there were a few “disagreements” between some of the kids, whether it was over a toy, name calling, or someone being excluded. After reading Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem Theology I wondered, do the kids have an equally cynical mind as Dunbar? His logic is that he believes in heaven because his “soul doth tell [him]” and that there must be a hell because his neighbors must go somewhere. This implies that his neighbors are bad people, so it made me wonder, what do the kids think of their peers when they hurt their feelings? I don’t think they would, the kids are very resilient and especially at such a young age they have a fairly short attention span so I doubt they would remember it too well. I just hope they would grow up  and not resemble the adults in both poems.