The Five Takeaways of Teaching Primary

When I was a naïve newly married 20-year-old, I longed for a calling in Primary. I didn’t get it until two years later, when we bought our house in Murray. It wasn’t long before I was teaching in Junior Primary, where the kids are ages three to seven, and thus consigning myself to the ranks of anonymity, because nobody knows who you are if you don’t go to Relief Society.

Later I would learn from my neighbor, who majored in early childhood education, that this invitation to teach Primary was a classic case of the bishopric breaking one of the unwritten rules of the Mormon universe—you do not call a full-time teacher to teach Primary every Sunday because then he/she has no respite from teaching. School teacher + room of wiggly kindergarteners (with ADHD) does not = blissful spiritual education for all. There is only one exception to this rule: nobody else in the ward will do it, which I suspect is what happens in our ward. For a long time, I taught by myself. Then Jesse was called to be my partner, and we have had the same class for two years, so now they’re six-year-olds.

So, in the fashion of the website www.fivetakeaways.com, (check out the Legos and the bees!!) here’s my Five Takeaways of Teaching Primary.

1. Do not feed the children.
Primary kids who get treats in church are like mogwais that get fed after midnight in the movie Gremlins, i.e. candy does NOT improve their behavior. The children may look adorable, but do not resist the temptation to feed them. If you do, and if your kids start to expect a treat every week, you are guaranteed to get Pavlovian classical conditioning gone wrong. The kids won’t respond favorably to your threatening stimulus: “If you aren’t reverent, you won’t get your treat today!” Instead, they will interrupt you every two minutes by raising their hands, and you might actually think they have something relevant to contribute to the discussion, but they simply must know, “Are we getting a treat today?! When are we getting a treat?! Next week can you bring jelly beans, I don’t like gummy bears…?!” And thus jelly beans are the reason for coming to church.

And if you fall into the trap of distributing treats every week, what happens if you’re sitting in Sacrament meeting, gazing off into space, and suddenly realize you forgot the treat at home? Why, you have to dig the car keys out of your purse, explain to your husband why you’re leaving Sacrament meeting early, and drive home to get it (this did not happen to me, in case you’re wondering).

And when kids get their treats, all sense of propriety is temporarily inhibited by the absorption of sugar into the bloodstream, so they throw their wrappers on the floor and forget to pick them up. And then they’re not hungry for lunch or dinner when they get home and parents are puzzled as to where their children’s appetites have gone—although, I haven’t ever heard of a parent complaining about this, so maybe this isn’t really a problem.

I suppose this is why the church’s auxiliary program manuals say “Do not feed the children.” Just resort to being the mean teacher who follows church rules. This has worked for me and Jesse thus far.


2. Do not tell the children where you live.
If you live anywhere in close proximity to your Primary children, and they think you’re even remotely cool, they will come find you and knock on your doors (or ring the doorbell 10 times in a row, in case you didn’t hear it the first five times) at inconvenient times—while you’re in the shower, cooking dinner, or just home from work after being surrounded by rambunctious seventh graders and being stuck in traffic. So it is best to do all your gardening, yard maintenance, and checking of mail at night, past their bedtime, because they equate your presence outside with an invitation to stop by.

If you’re of a weak constitution, like me, and all resolve breaks down when you see the little girl—who has loaded all her Barbie dolls and stuffed animals in her wagon and has towed it all the way across the street to your door because she’s been waiting all day for your car to arrive in your driveway to signal that you’re home—look up at you and say, “Hi Sarita! Can you come play?” you can’t say no. Even when you have a research paper to write, or a stack of papers to grade, or a throbbing migraine.

You’ll be sitting at home, lounging on the couch on Fourth of July weekend and hear a forceful adult-sounding knock, like the knock of persistent Amway sales people. But you look through the little window-glass thingy at the top of your door and see no one. So you open the door, and there they are. Two little boys asking if your husband can come play “Harry Potter” with them, because they already have a Harry, and a Ron and all they’re missing is a Voldemort. Or they’ll want to build Lego forts. Little do they know that the one day of free time you have off from work was never intended to be spent with them. But you can’t resist because they’re just so cute.

3. Do not leave home without a box of Kleenex and your hand sanitizer.
Can you guess where this is headed? Children are inveterate nose-pickers. Even the girls dressed in frilly outfits that make them look like little pink cupcakes do it. Right in front of you. Bless their hearts, they’ll attempt to be discrete and turn their heads, thinking perhaps that you can’t see it, but you always see it. It doesn’t seem to phase them either, that you’re making eye contact with them while they’re doing it, so maybe I should just forget about it. However, when you warn a kid to stop or he’ll get a bloody nose, and he doesn’t stop and gets a bloody nose and you have to steer him, with his head tipped back in the air, to the closest bathroom, you have to draw the line somewhere.

4. Do not say the word Christmas. Ever.
Just see if you can mention Christmas in a Primary lesson without turning the classroom into a slightly less chaotic version of the New York Stock Exchange with every child jumping in their seat, waving their hands in your face, and clamoring to tell you what they’re getting for Christmas. You might be teaching a lesson about gratitude and innocently say, “Gratitude means being thankful, like when you get a present from Grandma at Christmas, and—“ then you get this barrage of:

“Ooh, guess what I’m getting for Christmas? A cell phone, and I get to pick the color…”
“I already have a cell phone, but my mom said she’s going to get me a Polly Pocket helicopter…”
“Christmas is my favorite holiday because I get lots of presents!”
“I asked Santa for a Megatron Transformer, the kind that’s a truck and it turns into Megatron…”
“I have a story about Christmas, can I tell it? Please? Please? Please? Please? Ok, last year I got a Beauty and the Beast Barbie, and Isaac, he’s my brother, was mad at me, and he locked himself in the bathroom with the scissors and cut all her hair off, so my mom said I could get a new one this year, and this time I can get the one with the yellow dress and not the red dress… ”

And they’re all talking at the same time. When they realize you’re not listening, then they’ll just turn to their neighbor and talk about Christmas until Primary is over, if you let them. So, for your own sake, don’t say the word Christmas.

Disclaimer: Actually, the truth is, this happens with anything you say, and not just Christmas. Expect the same results if you’re telling a story about, say, a pet. Kids hear the word pet and they’ll all simultaneously chatter about their dog, cat, frog, hermit crab, or fish, or how someone killed their fish over Christmas vacation. Even ten minutes after the conversation has been pointed back on track, someone will still want to explain the story about how their dad killed cockroaches in Brazil on his mission (because some people have cockroaches for pets, right?). Just expect multiple digressions within the course of a 40 minute lesson.

5. Smile, because they love you.
Despite the nose picking and the frequent visits from children at odd hours, Primary has been our favorite calling. We don’t know what we’d do with ourselves if they released us. It’d be nice to go back to Relief Society, but then nobody would fight over who gets to sit next to you in Priesthood or Relief Society. After teaching in Relief Society or Priesthood, nobody has ever gone to the store to buy helium balloons and been inspired to name them Jesse and Sarita and draw faces on them. And we wouldn’t get nearly as many trick-or-treaters on Halloween, or cards that say “UR the gratest teechers.”