Mollie Is Three

Growing Up in School

Vivian Gussin Paley

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780226644943, 9780226644936
• eBook ISBN: 9780226075808
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A classic work by an educator the New York Times said "should be required reading wherever children are growing"

Mollie Is Three describes a year in the life of a little girl and her preschool classmates in a nursery school classroom run by Vivian Gussin Paley, whose groundbreaking ideas about the best way to teach young children continue to be influential today. We first encounter Mollie on the first day of school, just before her third birthday, and we follow her and her classmates for the next year. Alongside her, we go from confusion and uncertainty in new surroundings to growing understanding and confidence, as patterns emerge and Mollie begins to grasp their significance--and her teacher begins to understand how to track her growth and development.

Rather than offer an account of an idealized, all but imaginary child, Paley presents us with one actual kid, in all their complexity and confusion. The result is a landmark contribution to our understanding of child development and the role early education can play in fostering it.

1

On the first day, Mollie sits quietly at the playdough table watching Fredrick. She is waiting to find out what happens in school, and he is someone who makes things happen. He wants to know why he is here and how he can impose him self on so many people. He begins in unsubtle ways, knocking over blocks, grabbing toys, stomping on dolls, throwing sand–the list is familiar.

The other three-year-olds may have committed similar mischief, but seldom in such rapid succession and not yet in a classroom. Fredrick exaggerates and speeds up these behaviors, forcing me to reveal my intentions.

“Why do you bother everyone, Fredrick?”

“Don’t talk to me! I hate this school!”

“I must talk to you. I’m your teacher.”

“The next day after this one, I’m never coming back.”

“But it’s your class. You have to come back.”

“Then I’m angry.”

He shows me he is angry by turning his back when I read “Curious George,” but at dismissal time he sits on my lap.

“Am I bigger than everyone on this porch?” he asks.

“No, you’re not,” I tell him. “The four-year-olds are bigger and so are the teachers.” There are thirteen fours in our class, most of whom were here last year.

“No, I’m the biggest. And the strongest.”

The next morning he snatches the entire supply of playdough from Mollie, Emily, and Stuart. “It’s mine!” he shouts defiantly.

“Give it back, Fredrick. You can’t grab things from people.”

“It’s mine.”

“They had it first.”

“I don’t have any.”

“You have to say, ‘Can I have some?’”

“No.”

He cannot wait for such amenities. Nor has he reason to believe that the children will hand over a portion of their playdough; he certainly would not. Since others may have the same possessive urge, he’d better act out the feeling first.

Mollie’s eyes follow Fredrick as he confronts the unknown, ordered world of the classroom. She sits across from him at the snack table when he talks about the wicked monsters who enter his room at night.

“Last night I saw a monster in my bed–a big white monster. Then a dinosaur.” He looks around, expecting encouragement.

“Then what did the dinosaur do?” Stuart asks.

“He hided downstairs. Then he went upstairs.” Fredrick pauses to eat his graham cracker, watching me.

“It was a dream, Fredrick,” I say.

“No, teacher, listen, I want to tell you something. I saw a big white monster and then I saw a dinosaur and it was hiding by my bed under the covers and it was a monster in my room.”

“Fredrick, I know it really seemed like the monster was in your room, but it was all in your dream.”

“It wasn’t a dream. So I leaved the door open and then the dinosaur came in and then he didn’t eat me this time. He was putting his arm like this. With his fingers. He wanted to eat me up because he didn’t want me to go to school.”

“Why not?”

“Because he wanted to eat me all up so I couldn’t go to school. Because I wanted to come to school. And he wouldn’t let me.”

“I’m glad you came, Fredrick.”

“And it wasn’t a dream. There was a really monster.”

“It might have been a shadow on the wall, in the dark, shaped like a monster.”

“No.”

The children at the table look as if they too have seen these monsters. Mollie asks, “Is it the kind with green on top?” Fredrick nods. “Also on the bottom,” he adds.

It is the first time Mollie has spoken directly to another child. She talks to me early in the morning, before the others come, but grows silent as the classroom fills with children.

Fredrick has ways of getting immediate responses from people. Today he makes Mollie cry, and Libby, a four-year-old, is indignant. “That boy took the little girl’s cash register,” she reports to me.

“Give it back, Fredrick,” I order. “Mollie is crying. You can have it when she’s finished.”

Anger makes Mollie eloquent. “I’m already going to be finished now,” she sobs.

“Do you mean you are finished now, Mollie?”

She tightens her grip. “No! Not yet now!”

“Okay. She’ll be finished in a little while, Fredrick. Then you can have your turn.”

“Turns” and “little whiles” mean nothing to Fredrick. In five minutes he is back, sitting on the cash register, and Mollie is crying again.

This time, Libby takes charge. “He’s a bad boy! Don’t let him come to your birthday. He’s just a robber.”

Mollie stops crying and stares at Libby. Fredrick also pauses to consider. “Yeah, I am a robber,” he says solemnly.

“Well, too bad for you,” Libby counters, haughtily. “Because robbers can’t come in the doll corner, ha, ha, ha!” She looks at me for confirmation. Libby is in the group who decided last year that robbers are not allowed wherever babies are sleeping.

“She’s right, Fredrick. If you want to play in the doll corner, you’ll have to be something else, not a robber.”

“He can be the father,” Samantha says. “Put on this vest, Fredrick.”

“Mollie is the baby,” Libby decides. “Lie down here, sweet child.”

Suddenly, Mollie and Fredrick are part of a drama that has its own conventions. The roles are assigned, and, for the duration of the plot, events will be governed by an evolving set of rules that reflects the children’s own logic. There is nothing in my curriculum that can match the doll comer in its potential for examining behavior and judging the aftermath. The two three-year-olds know intuitively that once they begin to pretend they become accountable to the community of pretenders.

2

Mollie is brought to school every day before eight. In the empty rooms, her large vocabulary pours out in search of time and place.

“I’m not too big to reach that,” she says, trying to hang up her jacket. “But my already birthday is going to come now. Then I can be big to reach it.”

“When is your birthday, Mollie?”

“Tomorrow. It’s called October ninth.”

“October is the next month after this one. Then you’ll be three, Mollie. This month is called September.”

“When I get four, I’ll be three.”

She joins me at the painting table as I prepare the art materials. “Can you put in the brushes, Mollie?”

“I can put in the brushes.” She inserts one brush in a jar of red paint and begins to cover the paper in front of her.

“The other jars need brushes too, Mollie.”

“They do need brushes too,” she echoes, without looking up.

“Or do you want me to put them in?” I suggest, a bit impatiently.

“Do you want . . . do I not . . . I do not want you,” she answers.

Mollie is a passionate grammarian, reconstructing my sentences into useful shapes. She cares about form but eschews the message. Her obligation is fulfilled once she creates a sentence. In effect, she has pretend conversations with me.

“This pie is for Daddy,” Mollie murmurs, taking up a piece of playdough at the next table. She pounds and flattens the soft, floury mass, punctuating her monologue. “Daddy wants to finish dinner when he gets dinner and go to work and work some work. Give me a big piece a little tiny piece . . .”

“Look, Mollie, I made a snake.”

She examines my face, as if trying to understand the context of my remark. “Is that a real one? A real snake that one is. This is my castle. This.”

“Can my snake live in your castle?”

“I’m going to roll him up when he’s sleeping. Sh-sh. Time to go to school, little baby snake. Put on your school clothes.”

As the fantasy develops, her sentences achieve a continuity that eludes our conversations. She has moved to another plane and can suddenly view an entire scene about to unfold.

“I’m the mommy snake. ‘Read me a book,’ says the baby snake.” Mollie turns invisible pages, pretending to read. “The horsie and the chicken. And the robbers. Once upon a time there lived a horse and a chicken and a dog. And the next morning there was a robber in the house. That’s Fredrick. He’s the robber. That was scary.”

“The robber is scary?”

“The horsie and the chicken.”

Fredrick is the first classmate to enter Mollie’s early morning talk. She examines his behavior inside another fantasy and does not feel threatened; he scares the horse and chicken, not Mollie. Fredrick is an actor in her story and he knows “the monster with green on top” who visits her at night. If she continues to watch him, he may help her disclose other secrets not yet put into words.

3

Mollie tells me no secrets, but she is full of information. “Red is my favorite color,” she says.

“I do notice you paint a lot of red pictures.”

“Yes, I do notice a lot of red pictures that you do notice.” She halts, then completes the thought. “That I paint.”

Now, along with red paint, she institutes another ritual: she moves to a new chair for each painting. “Green is my favorite color, orange is my favorite color, blue is my favorite green.” But she continues to use only red.

“Mollie, it’s best to stay in the same seat and just get another sheet of paper. You’re using up every piece on the table. The other children won’t have a place to paint when they come.”

“They w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Mollie is Three: Growing Up in School
• Epilogue