Teacher feels at home in classroom

Seat Pleasant educator attended kindergarten where she works now

Thursday, Jan. 26, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Greg Dohler⁄The Gazette Indica Harley, a teacher at St. Margaret of Scotland School in Seat Pleasant, teaches kindergarten in the same room where she was a student in 1980. Here, student Aaron Hackett, 5, points to a cloud in author Eric Carle’s book ‘‘Little Cloud” during story time.

‘‘They are my friends. I spend every day with them,” she said.

For that reason, she wants the room to be as inviting as possible. She has decorated it with bright primary colors, large drawings of pictures matching the letter of the alphabet with which they begin, the ‘‘Lord’s Prayer,” and illustrations on parts of speech and the parts to a book.

Harley knows exactly what it’s like to look at her classroom from a 5-year-old’s perspective since she was a kindergarten student in the same room in 1980. She graduated from the Catholic school as an eighth-grader.

‘‘When you’re in kindergarten, everything is so much bigger. Now that I’m an adult, it’s so small, but it’s a comfort,” she said. ‘‘It’s that feeling of home because I’m familiar with it.”

Harley, who lives in Forestville, felt the same way when she returned to St. Margaret’s three years ago. She had been teaching at a school in Baltimore for five years, heard about the St. Margaret’s opening and applied.

In her interview with Principal Charon Hines, she asked to be placed with the kindergartners. The school has one kindergarten classroom, she said.

Teaching in the room in which Harley was a student is not her only connection to St. Margaret’s. Lorraine Mayfield, her mother, has run the Child Center there for the past decade.

For Mayfield, having her daughter teach at the school is a source of pride.

‘‘It makes me feel good to have her here,” the Capitol Heights resident said.

For Harley, working with her mother means another person she can turn to for advice or even if she needs someone to watch the children when she needs to use the restroom.

She said she depended upon her mother for that reason a lot when she was pregnant with one of her two sons, two years ago, she said.

The best part of working with kindergartners is seeing their growth from September as she prepares them for first grade, Harley said, as the children practiced their penmanship.

‘‘When they come in, there are some things they may not be able to do,” she said, adding she enjoys seeing their penmanship become neater over the year and how they remember terms like ‘‘symmetry” she had mentioned days earlier.

In a classroom of 16, where boys outnumber girls three to one, Harley is patient and calm with the children. When she wants quiet, she raises one hand high and puts the fingers of her other hand over her lips. The children typically and quickly follow suit.

‘‘You have to have a lot of energy, a lot of patience. But it’s fun. Every day is different. They say the funniest things,” she said.

Her first year at the school, she had more girls than boys. Last year was similar to this year.

‘‘I find the girls to be more talkative. The boys are more aggressive and playful,” Harley said.

Whether parents have boys or girls, they seem to appreciate her efforts. The mother of one boy wrote a letter apologizing for his misbehavior and promising to work with him on it. She also made him write his own apology letter.

Waldorf resident Tikki Teixiera, whose daughter Jayla is in the class, said she knows how hard Harley’s job is since she is a fifth-grade teacher at John Eager Howard Elementary in Capitol Heights.

Since this is Jayla’s first year in the school, she didn’t attend the prekindergarten program like many of her classmates and was a little behind at first, Teixiera said.

But since Harley has been working with the girl, she now proceeds with her homework independently at home, her mother said.

‘‘She’s a very caring, nurturing teacher. She likes to challenge the students,” Teixiera said of Harley.

Harley also has received attention from other educators.

Liz Whelan, principal of St. Hugh’s School, which teaches kindergarten through eighth grades in Greenbelt, toured St. Margaret’s for the first time last month as part of a parent meeting. She said she was impressed with the displays of words and parts of speech she saw in Harley’s classroom.

‘‘I picked it up in five minutes. It showed how much education is going on in the classroom,” Whelan said.

E-mail Jennifer Donatelli at jdonatelli@gazette.net.