Achy Hands, Tired eyes, and Bursting hearts

I can feel the blisters forming on my thumb, index, and pinky finger as I cut along the penciled outline. With one more swipe of the blades, the paper detaches, and falls to the table below. I set down my trusty pair of scissors and breathe a sigh of relief: my materials prep for the night is over.
I love arts and crafts as much, if not more, than the next guy. However, after cutting out the first dozen or two shapes, it starts to take a toll. From my time as a Jumpstart Corp Member, I have realized that preschool teachers take on more cutting, pasting, drawing, and laminating than educators at any other level.  They work tirelessly to make sure that their kids have activities to complete, resources to improve their learning outside of class, and a classroom decorated with materials that promote a sense of belonging and everyday learning for their children. These teachers, however, provide for their entire class; my materials prep is normally just for my three partner children. I cannot imagine the blisters, ink stains and sticky fingers that normal preschool teachers go through on a daily basis to make enough materials for a dozen or so preschoolers. Looking back, I have so much more appreciation of my kindergarten teacher for all of the little things she did to promote my education. Of course, her work was a thankless task, as is the work of all teachers, but they proceed anyway with achy hands, tired eyes, and hearts bursting with love of serving their kids.

At the end of the day, I have a love-hate relationship with materials prep. I love the break from my college workload of scouring research databases and writing papers and I love to play with paper and crayons as a part of my job. The only hate comes from the physical and mental exhaustion of completing a major project. Even then, I don’t actually hate it—I just like to hate it. Looking at it from a different angle, the exhaustion is just a sign that I did something worthwhile with the time, energy, and hands that I am given.

Audrey Hepburn once quipped: “As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.” Jumpstart, through materials creation, has helped me to see just that. The greatest benefit of materials prep is not putting my homework aside or making crafts; it is helping my kids to learn and grow just a little bit more. Even if most of my children never use the materials, the multiple hours I spend on a given project will have been all worth it if just one child improves the slightest bit on a single skill. No matter how achy my hands are, how tired my eyes become, my heart will always be bursting with the love of serving my purpose of helping my partner children—and this is what keeps me going.

~Alison Brown
Corps member
Team Joy 2