AJ came into my room this morning at 7:02 looking a little sleepy. �I get to go to kindergarten again today!�

Boy, do I hope he can hold onto this attitude.

Gradually over the course of the evening and this morning, we got a lot of information about yesterday�s activities. They got a tour of the school. They drew a picture of themselves that will be put up in the hallway outside their classroom and will eventually come home in a portfolio at the end of the school year. A kid named Juan was apparently causing a lot of trouble � �He wasn�t being a good listener.� AJ seems to be under the impression that Juan�s bad behavior cost them all recess, which didn�t happen yesterday. I�m still trying to figure out where he got that idea, which seems rather unlikely. I�m guessing recess went by the wayside when the busses were nearly a half an hour late arriving. I learned that Haley�s pencil box was bigger than his but his was shinier (his is silver). I learned that there are two clocks in the classroom: �One is shaped like an apple and another is shaped like a clock.�

I asked AJ about the other kids at his table � there are six of them and he knows two from the neighborhood. �One is a boy and he had a messy pencil box. He kept dropping things. One is a girl. And the other is a girl with crazy hair.�

�How is her hair crazy?�
�She has two ponytails and it kind of hangs down in the back.�

I know exactly who he is talking about. Her name is C. and she is one of the 2 or 3 African-American kids in his entire school, which is 75 percent white, and less than 1 percent black with the remainder being primarily Hispanic. AJ is fascinated with her long, straightened and elaborately styled hair, which is so different from his own.

Our part of the world is overwhelmingly white. There is a large Latino (mostly Mexican) population as well, but the communities are fairly segregated, as seems to be typical in suburbia. The segregation is primarily due to issues of economics. AJ�s preschool was pretty much white through and through � in his three years there, I recall meeting only one non-white student in one of his classes. The fact that AJ�s class is about 50 percent non-white is an anomaly that I welcome. But it�s introducing some interesting questions.

AJ has no concept of race. He knows some people look different from other people. He knows sometimes that difference might be hair color or eye color or skin color or language or some combination of all of those things. He has no knowledge of the categories that such characteristics imply. His interest lies in the difference itself. He has no historical baggage to bring to the table. We haven�t talked much about it, and I have no intention of having a discussion about some of the less savory parts of our history at this particular point, although I did suggest that telling C. that her hair looked crazy was probably not complementary and that perhaps he should keep such comments to himself. AJ considers crazy a complement. If someone told him he has crazy hair, I�m sure he�d love it. Perhaps C. herself would love it, but perhaps not. Her meticulous white color and lacy socks and shiny shoes suggest that crazy is not the look she�s going for. I don�t want AJ to say anything to her to make her uncomfortable, but at the same time I don�t want to reinforce any sense of difference. For now I�ll let things slide and see what happens. Hopefully AJ will figure this out on his own. The adults are certainly not doing much better.

6 people said it like they meant it