My 5-year-old son hasn't been quite so fixated on the "why" to which leading Italian pre-school educational researcher Carlina Rinaldi refers. He has, however, been throwing a lot of "when" questions into the air-space around the dining room table where, like peanut butter on morning toast, the inquisitive nature of his character is often at its warmest.
Take his ability to process the start-date of an anticipated event and turn it into a series of ever-diminishing numbers, a trait that would have Sesame Street character The Count clapping in exultation.
Fuelled by a series of trial visits late last year and perhaps further inspired by a forest green hat, shorts to match and a striped shirt, my son's latest refrain is one likely being repeated in households throughout the land at this point of the year.
It goes something like this: "How many sleeps until ... school?" Yet listen carefully and one might find, amid all that excited talk, an inkling of fear.
"They are still 5 and tears are not that far away," warns Steven Sexton, a lecturer in primary education at the University of Otago's College of Education.
"Even when you're 6, tears are not that far away. They are still very fragile in that regard, but they don't know it."
Dr Sexton has been interviewing school-aged children (from 5 to 18) at a dozen schools in the Dunedin area, documenting pupils' perceptions of teachers. Involving about 100 children, with pupils split into three age-groups (years 1-4, 5-8 and 9-13), the relatively small study forms part of a wider research project titled "The purpose of male teachers", for which he has received a University of Otago research grant.
"The bulk of funding is for this year only but I started at the end of last year," Dr Sexton explains.
"I have a few more schools to go into at the start of term one and then I'll take that information and go back and talk to the teachers themselves - 'here's what the students in this age-group are saying' - and gauge how that affects teachers' perceptions of their roles.
"The ultimate goal is to be able to say, 'here are the issues facing teachers and teaching [as opposed to the idea] we need more male role models for boys in school. In most cases, boys don't care what gender the teacher is when it is academically based. On personal issues, they do relate better to males, but when it comes down to academics, they just want a good teacher."
In fact, what most new entrants want is to know they are safe.
"It is a huge social change for most of them," Dr Sexton says.
"In early childhood education, they are in small groups where they get a lot of attention, a lot of one-on-one 'face-time'. If they come from home, they are used to getting a lot of attention. They go into school and it's a bigger crowd.
"That feeling of being left alone was a big concern for a lot of them. It's the great fear of the unknown. If they have older siblings, they might be telling them lovely things or they might be scaring the hell out of them."
Having friends from early childhood centres entering the same class helps, too, Dr Sexton says.
"First of all, they want to feel safe in the classroom. That sense of safety and security is very important. At first, it starts as a physical security - knowing where things are. The teachers they liked were those who showed them what to do and where to go."
Once (or, if) those initial fears were quelled, a child's concerns then became more emotionally based: did what they say count in class? Did the teacher acknowledge what they said? Did they get called on to make a contribution?
It is important children know that if they make a mistake or do something silly they aren't going to be laughed at or belittled by the teacher, Dr Sexton says, adding children might be able to deliver a put-down, but they don't like being on the receiving end.
"Having been a teacher myself, I realise there are some teachers who think kids understand sarcasm ... no they don't. Most teenagers don't get it. Five-year-olds just don't know when a teacher is making a joke or not. It's a sophisticated level of vocabulary that they just don't have.
"These are the general characteristics that students wanted. There were other characteristics of teachers' personalities they liked or disliked as well.
"In most cases, there are very few males [teachers] in new entrant classes, but gender is not really the issue with the students. The teachers they felt comfortable around were those who made them feel welcome, but they were also teachers they knew they could trust."
Typical manifestations of anxiety prompted by an absence of those conditions include children panicking and going into their shells or, conversely, misbehaving in order to get attention.
Question: What do you get when you combine the "doing" skills of literacy, mathematics, problem-solving and the development of fine motor skills with the "being" competencies of communication, perseverance, social interaction and personal responsibility?
Answer: An exhausted child.
The learning curve for new entrants is steep, Dr Sexton says.
"That's why they are so tired. It's not so much because of all the running around they've done in those first two weeks - it's all the thinking they have to do. Most of them are mentally drained."
Roseanna Bourke, a senior lecturer in Victoria University's School of Educational Psychology and Pedagogy and a registered psychologist and teacher, says the impact of learning the ropes - i.e. all those school rules, be it in the classroom or playground - shouldn't be underestimated.
"One international study (Méard, Bertone, and Flavier, 2008) looked at how 6-to-8-year-olds negotiated and internalised rules and they showed how quickly young children internalise 'rules' at school - e.g., getting to class on time, not speaking unless being called to, lining up.
"There are rules for learning to read, learning to write, how to hold a pencil, and there are rules governing academic subjects. Some rules are explicit and others are negotiated daily by teacher and learner (Méard et al., 2008). Rules are not, of course, confined to school-based settings. Young people quickly establish what the 'rules' are in any given context."
Dr Sexton points out that the varying abilities of new-entrant children is worth considering, too.
"Even though there might only be 16 of them, they don't come in as carbon copies of each other.
"Some parents will be reading to children at home, so they will have an understanding of how to read; some will know how to write their names and do basic numbers; and some won't know any of that.
"Some come from more of an oral language culture so they are quite good at telling and listening to stories and at verbal communication but to sit down with a pen and paper in their hand ... they might never have done it."
The challenge for a teacher, he says, is to quickly gauge the range of abilities and "pace out" how to teach each child.
Yet a teacher's influence extends well beyond any academic issues.
"Sometimes teachers forget just what an impact they have on students," Dr Sexton says.
"It is that personal influence teachers can have that they sometimes forget.
"When you have a student say''this teacher sucks', there is probably a reason why. Sometimes it might just be a case of 'she makes me do maths and I hate maths'; well, OK she's probably not a bad teacher. But if the child says 'she yells and makes me feel stupid', well, there's an issue.
"Virtually everyone can remember the two or three teachers who stood out. You spend so much time in school. It is such a big part of people's lives. People will tell you why their teachers were good or bad; very clear memories will come out," Dr Sexton says.
Five-year-olds are no different, he has discovered. They know what they like in a teacher and what they don't.
"If you are 5 and you don't like your teacher, that's a long year. By the time you're done, that's one-sixth of your life."
