White Sterilite Bins

*This was originally posted to my Facebook page on March 23, 2020. Some edits have been made from its original post, and it is shared with Donna’s gracious permission.

Sixteen years ago, perhaps exactly to this week, I entered Donna Rosso’s integrated preschool classroom to complete the second portion of my student teaching practicum experience. Admittedly, I wasn’t super excited about the experience going in. I had just spent eight weeks in first grade and I was in LOVE. My supervising teacher in that experience was fabulous. Her excitement for current approaches to reading and writing instruction was contagious, and we were impressed day after day by the students’ progress and abilities. I wasn’t done learning with them when it was time for me to leave them. Especially to head in to a preschool room. It was a younger age than I wanted to teach, but Early Childhood Education was the only Education major that would allow me the double major in Psychology I was interested in. A preschool practicum was simply part of the deal. I figured I’d do my time, take what I could from the experience, and then apply for first or second grade regular education teaching positions for the following school year.

As it turns out, that preschool practicum in the corner classroom of a little school in a little town shaped me far more than I expected. There are a trio of women I owe my career to, and Donna is one of them. The other two were also found in that placement. All three attended my wedding.

Half of the 12 students in Donna’s classroom were on the autism spectrum and I quickly fell deeper in love with them than I had with first grade. I learned the give and take of being part of a team that was led with appropriately high expectations. I learned to use picture symbols to communicate. I learned The Planets Song from Blue’s Clues. I learned how to toilet train a child. I learned that white Sterilite bins are the answer to any organizational problem. I learned the gift of genuine connection. I learned to take an intentional headbutt to the nose in stride and calmly carry on. I learned to celebrate the smallest of victories, which are in fact anything BUT small. I learned that public school has an overwhelming amount of limitations yet teachers are resilient and persistent and creative. I learned the vast differences in family situations and parental abilities. I learned that joy and safety are found in the repetition of the familiar. I learned the gift and humbling perspective of working with students in their own homes. I learned that the best thing to do when stuck in a pattern of negative behaviors is to take a step back, reduce or delay expectations if possible, and rebuild the relationship. I learned to trust my instinct in teaching strategies and problem solving. I learned that it turns out, I love special education. I had found my tribe.

For more than four years, I taught at a different school in the district. This was due in no small part to Donna’s insistence that I follow the superintendent through the halls of the school one day during my practicum in order to catch his stride and introduce myself. Like me, many of my students had started their public school career in that corner integrated preschool classroom. Occasional visits to her classroom after the end of the school day resulted in problem solving, collaboration, and camaraderie. We began working together in a new way through providing in-home educational therapy services to a student in a neighboring school district. Donna worked without ceasing to promote inclusion, accessibility, and genuine connection and interaction. She taught me to “presume competence” long before I’d ever heard the phrase. My heart and teaching style were shaped by the way in which she considered the whole child at the forefront of her teaching methodology.

Donna eventually took a principal position at an Early Childhood Center in another community and graciously passed along many of her classroom supplies before moving on. Among other things, I took a stack of the white Sterilite bins that had been used throughout her classroom to store materials and on the tabletops to corral objects that were temporarily in use. They travelled with me as I set up and dismantled five different classrooms. Every time I set the white bins in place it was a physical reminder of her presence in my teaching. When I left teaching to stay home with my sons, the bins spent a few years stacked in the basement next to my boxes of classroom supplies. They have since been put to use in several ways. Mostly, to organize the boys’ basement play space.

This afternoon I found myself trying to manage the workbooks and folders and manipulatives and all of the homeschooling accoutrement that had suddenly accrued on the kitchen table. I realized, I need a Donna Rosso bin! I found an unoccupied bin, placed everything inside, and smiled thinking about everything else these bins have contained. Art materials. Story props. Lesson materials for individual students. Velcro. Instruments. MCAS-Alt work samples. Morning work folders. Laminated activities. And then…cloth diapers. Fuzzy snowballs. Matchbox cars. Thomas trains.

Next year, I hope to be setting these bins in place in a new classroom. For now, it feels appropriate to have my teaching mentor with me during this pandemic homeschooling* experience in the form of a white Sterilite bin on my kitchen table. 

*Note: Seven weeks in, I am no longer considering this to be “homeschooling”. This is absolutely crisis schooling at home, and teachers working tirelessly to connect with students and teach virtual lessons from their homes are AMAZING. My understanding of teachers as “resilient and persistent and creative” has skyrocketed since I initially wrote this piece.