Is Your School a Place of Abundance or an Empty Pit of Scarcity?

A Lot of Teachers are Hoarders

In fall of 2006, I took over Ms. Yasuhara’s preschool position and became a preschool teacher. The universe had granted me the grade level I wanted.

But the wanting didn’t end there.

The wanting never ends.

The next thing I hoped for from Ms. Yasuhara was some of her decades-long collection of STUFF.

I owned very little of my own teacher STUFF like the toys and educational tools every educator uses to teach, razzle dazzle, and keep students quiet.

I had been teaching kindergarten for a few years, but most of the accoutrements of that grade level belonged to the room, not to me personally. I had to leave most of everything behind and arrive to preschool empty handed.

When teachers teach for over a quarter of century, like Ms. Yasuhara, turns out they hoard truckloads of teaching materials. Some of it is outdated clutter, but a lot of it is classic and actually can still be very useful. Even those vintage blue-stained Frank Schaffer mimeograph sheets can always be repurposed.

I assumed she wouldn’t want to keep most of her teaching materials during her retirement because, well, why the hell would she?

I assumed wrong.

Ms. Yasuhara cleaned out the classroom like the Grinch who stole Christmas.

The room looked burglarized when she was done moving out of it. I was too timid to ask her to leave anything because I assumed it was obvious that as a relatively new teacher I didn’t own too many things and could use some charity. I was hoping she would feel philanthropic towards poor little ol’ me. She didn’t.

In fact, she asked me to help her load her car. I carried out boxes and boxes of games and educational materials I could’ve really used. She was hauling away math manipulatives, toys, puzzles, and books I desperately desired.

As I was helping her load her car, Ms. Yasuhara revealed to me that her house was so crowded with teaching supplies that she had to create pathways to maneuver around her home. As she told me this, I suppressed screaming, “Well, then, leave me something, lady! Hello?!” She said she had so many things in her house that she couldn’t even fully open her front door. I was thinking, “You know that you’re describing a psychological disorder (and a future TV show), right?”

But I didn’t want to criticize or antagonize someone at the end of their career. I respected her, her choice of profession, her professionalism, and its longevity. I respected her seniority. I was happy to be taking her place, and that would have to be enough for me. I had successfully inserted myself into the wonderland that is preschool, anything extra (like crayons and pencils) would just have to be the icing on that cake.

Ms. Yasuhara shut her car trunk, entered the driver’s seat, and drove away.

I never ever saw her again. It was that strange experience of seeing a work colleague every day for years on end and then, suddenly, one day, never seeing them again.

Bye! Have a good life!

The Promised Land

My preschool class that year resembled the prison cell of a despotic country—punitively empty and depressingly drab.

The two neighboring classes by comparison, those of Ms. Watanabe and Ms. Ong, were opulent playlands of toys, crafts, and colorful kid debris. My students would ask as we passed by their rooms, “How come they have more toys than us?”

I didn’t really have a good answer for them except, “Welcome to capitalism, kiddos.”

Ms. Watanabe, of course, did help me out. She offered up ideas and donations to me.

Ms. Ong was another story.

I once asked her for a paper template of a really cute Father’s Day card that took the shape of a man’s shirt and tie. I had seen the card many times before in workshops, but I didn’t possess a template to replicate it. This was before Pinterest and other websites offered up everything free online.

When I asked her for a copy, she responded, “Don’t you have any of your own ideas?”

Oh, bitch, I thought. I removed my proverbial chola hoop earrings readying myself for a preschool teacher street fight.

I didn’t actually say what I wanted to say, but the chola inside my head repeated the following:

First of all, this is not your original idea. It’s a run-of-the-mill project found in classrooms all over the United States. It’s a piece of white construction paper in the shape of man’s dress shirt, not a fucking Michelangelo.

Secondly, what happened to sharing is caring?

Some teachers can become really stingy. They operate from a place of extreme scarcity and lack.

That’s the trauma of teaching in public schools. Faculty members feel they have to guard their teaching materials like suspicious dragons safeguarding gold treasure because they never know if or when or where their next resource is coming from. They teach in poor schools and therefore act poor.

Famed psychotherapist Esther Perel in her podcast How’s Work? recognizes this dynamic as an element of many workplaces, “Every work environment is going to negotiate between two outcomes in terms of the culture of the workplace: there’s enough for everyone to go around vs. whatever you get, is my loss…Once they (workers) understand that this (their workplace) is a place of abundance, they also gather around each other, they support each other, and they value solidarity, they stand united.” The scramble for resources and ideas at a public school often can pit teachers against teachers as if we’re all under a piñata waiting to sit our body on whatever candy falls upon us.

Thankfully the Internet, and such websites as Pinterest and Teacherspayteacher.com, have made most of the scarcity-mentality obsolete or, at least, challenged. An inexhaustible supply of ideas and materials is always readily available online.

Teaching preschool with next to no materials turned out to be fine.

I was able to purchase some limited supplies from a preschool teacher’s budget that had been allocated to me, and I also received some donations. The truth is, I learned to teach with imagination and whatever junk was lying around.

A public school teacher learns to steal, borrow, and make up what they need as if Mr. Rogers found himself on a desert isle.

You want large dice? Fold a cube out of tagboard and mark it with some dots. You want individual white boards? Slip a white sheet of paper in a protective plastic sheet. Voilà. A poor man’s white board. Also, nowadays, many teachers hustle on donation websites such as DonorsChoose, acquiring everything from free color printers to art supplies to Las Vegas getaways (the last one is not true, just kidding).

There is no longer a need for teachers to amass impressive clutter collections like the Little Mermaid in her secret cove of thingamabobs. Many older teachers seem to maintain closets full of random but beloved crap. I’ve encountered storage units stockpiled with maracas, masks, and feathers as if the educators were preparing for an emergency Mardi Gras.

I myself have fallen prey to such clinging accumulation but on a smaller scale. For years, I stowed away a marionette, two large nautilus shells, and a couple of ukuleles in my classroom closet like I was some secret traveling circus man. I couldn’t even play the ukuleles!

They just sat there in my closets, pristine and unused. The truth was I rarely ever brought the items out of the closet because I was too worried the kids would destroy them, but at the same time perpetually storing them just defeated their purpose. Eventually, I gave them away to other teachers.

Whatever we public school teachers do have, we have enough. Not a lot, but enough.

If you believe we live in an abundant world, you’ll discover that abundance all around.

The Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, for instance, used to have a free lending library where educators could check out taxidermied falcons and glass-encased spiders to bring to their classrooms for exploration. It’s weird, but it’s something.

Parents, even low-income parents, can always donate items such as tissues, cleaning supplies, and pencils from the 99-cents store. A working-class father once donated a box of random colored paper he received from his workplace. Not exactly on my wish list, but I didn’t need paper all that year.

Once I changed my attitude and asked how our school was an abundant place to work, how this life and city and neighborhood was a place of plenty, I noticed aspects particular to our school that made it feel like a more prosperous place to work. Yes, A. Elementary was a federally-designated Title One school with nearly the entire student body qualified for free lunch but that designation didn’t have to determine the education that was being provided by us teachers. 

Our school was located by a metro subway stop that offered us access to public transportation we could, and did, use to travel and explore the smorgasbord that is our city. Who needed $400 chartered bus rides? My kindergarteners and I hopped on that subway and went exploring for the price of a couple of tokens each.

In addition, A. Elementary teachers cultivated a learning garden on our campus, growing flowers, fruits, and vegetables. Our school also possessed a spacious playground for physical education and large-scale performances. There was an old but working kiln that some teachers took advantage of for ceramic projects. If we looked carefully, there were resources unique to our school.

Staff members were writing grants, requisitioning free buses, and even going on cultural exchanges in foreign countries, returning to our school with a revitalized expertise. This is what public school was when I began my career at the turn of the century—staffed by a multitude of professionals who did their darnedest with the resources and human capital they had at hand.

Groundbreaking educator Caroline Pratt, in her memoir I Learn from Children, spoke to the idea of cultivating a similar abundant attitude when teaching. When she first set up her seminal The City and Country School in 1911 in Greenwich Village, New York, she spoke of how her very idea of school was always expansive in nature, “A school, like a home is where you find it, and to the traditional school it makes little difference what the surroundings are….but the school as I envisioned it had no fixed limits, or walls…And as the children make use of whatever they can find around them for their learning, so would the school.”

I hadn’t yet read her memoir but intuitively I knew, as a public-school teacher, that school is what I made of it. Even if I found myself in a nearly-empty basement classroom with a few left behind colored blocks and a bunch of four year olds asking “Where are all the toys?” that would have be enough for us, and it was.

Learning is all around, there’s never a scarcity of it. If I concentrated on all that I did not have my teaching would have been paralyzed.

Of course, my own true fount of wealth was right across the hallway from me where my former kindergarten teacher, Ms. Watanabe, taught preschool. She was as amazing and lovely as she was when I was five years old.

It was a year of teaching that I cherish because of her mentorship and proximity. I’m sure we annoyed each other sometimes with our different teaching styles, but there was always respect and love for each other.

We worked, we laughed, we went on field trips together, our kids performed a dance called Zapatos Nuevos during the Spring Festival, and we dressed them as toy soldiers and dolls for the Christmas show. They were all so damn cute I could hardly stand it. And I couldn’t believe all of life’s serendipitous twists and turns that had to happen to land me in her vicinity professionally, teaching parallel to my very own kindergarten teacher.

I was in an abundant place.

Ms. Ong could keep her stupid Father’s Day shirt template; I had Ms. Watanabe.