Today was... well, it was Day 2 of Kindergarten, and I suspect a fairly typical one in the summer experience. I cannot call it bad, because truthfully the kids were well-behaved and not one cried (like they did yesterday) to take a nap. Yet, it was *hard.* I had a carefully planned lesson for today's objective (to identify a number one less than a given number) only to discover a significant portion of my class had no number sense and could only barely manage counting forward (if that), let alone backwards. One dearheart told me that 22 came after 5, and I could not for the life of me figure out where in the classroom she was looking to come up with that number.

That being said, it was a day of falling in love with students who, already, are years behind their privileged peers. I have only four weeks to work with these dearhearts, and Kindergarten is far from my ideal age range, but if I can make a difference in their future achievement, I will be happy. I asked a child why we were doing what we were doing, and one of them (as I hoped) said so that we could count like a first grader. Another child piped in so that we could then eventually count like a third grader. I followed these two statements with so that we could then count like fifth grader, and then a seventh grader, and then a high schooler... and eventually like a COLLEGE student!

Their response was a bunch of giggles and a few exclaimed "College?!" back to me. Yet all of them beamed with pride over the possibility that what we were doing now might prepare them for this very distant dream. I hope their future teachers tell them the same thing. They have a right to teachers who will not give up on them after seeing diagnostic test results.