May 18, 2006

Antioch School teachers Jeanie Felker and Brian Brogan working with kindergartner Fisher Lewis on a play house. Felker will retire at the end of the year after 21 years. A celebration for her will be held at the school on May 27, 2–4 p.m.

By Diane Chiddister

Last week kindergarten students at the Antioch School were building a house. Not a pretend house or a doll house, but a human-sized playhouse whose walls were being framed inside the school’s art room.

Five-year-olds measured boards, carefully marked the right spots and then, protected by face masks and two watchful adults, pounded in nails. It was serious work, and the students were full of not only a child’s energy and enthusiasm, but also adult-sized purpose and pride.

Gently guiding the children through the process was their teacher, Jeanie Felker. She spoke soft words acknowledging their hard work, encouraged the children to come up with their own answers to questions, and, when a little boy hesitated at the top of a ladder, carefully offered support.

“I’ll put my hand on your back so you feel steady,” she said.

It seems appropriate that, in her last year of 21 years of teaching, Felker’s kindergarten students are building a house. The yearlong project incorporates many lessons, such as the math skills needed for measuring, language skills for writing letters to gather materials, visual skills for design and group skills for making decisions.

But most important, the lessons are learned through a hands-on project that captures the children’s creativity, energy and imagination. And because building the house was their idea, the project has captured their hearts as well.

“I have learned to completely trust the process of learning, to see how essential it is to the core of us all,” Felker wrote in a recent statement. “I have learned that when you have an environment that acknowledges and supports the process in each of its members, the community becomes capable of accomplishing great things.”

On Saturday, May 27, from 2 to 4 p.m., the school will host a celebration for Felker, who is retiring at the end of the school year.

Recently, when other teachers at the school met with Felker to discuss what they have learned from her, they didn’t know quite where to begin. So Younger Group teacher Kit Crawford spoke first about something simple: how Felker talks with children.

“There’s everything there,” Crawford said. “There’s respect and there’s assurance, there’s affirmation, there’s everything a child needs — it is all right there. It always seems to be successful, because the children always bounce away with whatever they seem to have come to that they are going to do now.”

And what the children bounce away with, said Older Group teacher Chris Powell, is a greater sense of their own capabilities.

“I like the way you let them come to what to do next, giving them the opportunity and waiting for them to come up with their solutions, and not instilling in them that kind of decision you want them to make,” she said. “It takes such a tremendous amount of patience.”

Crawford told a story of following Felker down the school’s hallway one day, behind a kindergartner who was carrying a big platter of vegetables. The platter began tipping further and further toward the floor and Crawford expected the carrots and broccoli to slide off. It was all she could do not to jump in and grab the platter, she said, but she took her cue from Felker, who calmly followed the child as he and the platter made it safely to its destination.

“It’s Jeanie’s extraordinary faith in children that I’ve taken many pages from over the years,” Crawford said. “Those kinds of lessons we learned, that patience and that big picture come together where Jeanie would, through integrity, just refuse to do a child’s work for them because then she would be taking away from that child...that little moment when she would say to the child, ‘Hmm, what you think about that?’ ”

Over the years, Felker said, she has learned many things about children.

“I have learned that they come in infinite varieties, that they have as many different learning styles as there are individuals,” she said. “I’ve learned that they have tremendous capacity for kindness and fairness and can be wonderfully cooperative human beings. I’ve learned that they love having a community that makes sense to them. And I’ve learned that they have an enormous curiosity to learn. If that curiosity isn’t squelched, it takes them to places truly amazing.”

In the last month of her teaching career, Felker said that she feels “many things” about leaving her work with children. She said she knows that the time is right to leave, because she feels herself losing the energy she believes she needs to work with small children. And she said she is very excited about and confident in her successor, Lindie Keaton, an Antioch School parent and experienced teacher who will take over the kindergarten job next fall.

But Felker said she also “grieves at the thought of leaving such a special place.”

“I was extraordinarily fortunate to find a place that was just right for me. It has been such a joyful job,” she said.

She also will sorely miss the support and camaraderie she feels with her fellow staff members: Crawford, Powell, Nursery School teacher Ann Guthrie, art and science teacher Brian Brogan, school manager Dianne Collinson and teacher aide Ren Smith.

Most of all, she said, she will miss the children. Felker recalled a recent incident in which she was walking in the Glen with her class when one boy bent down to study an animal track in the mud. He examined the track, then announced that the track belonged to a bear, and that he was sure because he had sniffed it.

“Who else in my life will say things like that?” Felker said, laughing. “I will truly miss the perspective on the world of 5- and 6-year-olds.”

And she will miss the challenge of her work, Felker said.

“I kept learning. I was the learner too,” she said. “It was the freshness of every day that kept me going this long.”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com