sticks and stones

My students are hunched over their books. With only two pages remaining in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men they are straining with suspense. They're settled in a broad circle around me and they follow along as I read aloud.

When we're done. When those two pages are in the past. When George and Slim have walked off, arms around each other with Slim saying, "You hadda, George...I swear you hadda." My students and I have shared something. We have witnessed, in 100 short pages what it feels like to fall in love with a character, then to have seen awful things befall them just to see what they are made of.

And yet in the midst of those hundred pages, we shared so much.

One of those shared moments was our collective horror at Steinbeck's use of racial slurs.

This year I tried a new approach to discussing slurs in class.

At the inspiration of my friend Ben, I looked at some of the different words for snow in the Inuktitut language. I wrote eleven of them on different slides and shared them with my students.

"What do the number of words for snow in Inuktitut tell us?"

My students were brilliant. They waxed poetically about the way the peoples of northern Canada and the Arctic must revere snow, understand snow, and they noted that both "there must be a need for all these names because they use all the words in their daily life," and "snow must just be so important to them."

Now it was my turn again,

"What do we have lots of words for?"

My students turned to their neighbor and discussed the things we have many names for:

money and phones were the two unanimous choices.

But then I asked them another question,

"I want you to take sixty seconds to silently think of as many put downs and insults as you can."

There was a weighty pause as the air drained out of the classroom.

"You may not say any of these words, I will just ask you for the number."

My point here was clearly about the variety of ways we use words to harm other people. The students' lists ranged from 21 to 57 words.

And, truly, by the time we got back to Steinbeck's use of terrible, hurtful, despicable language which was heartbreakingly appropriate for the era in which it was written, my students were acknowledging things about the ways we destroy each other, the ways we break each other down.

I am always proud of my students, but on this day I was particularly moved. I saw them as future lawmakers, future parents, future world leaders, and future teachers. It must be noted, however, that they do not always agree, but that fact makes me even more encouraged. I saw them look at language as a way of moving the needle of humanity toward positivity or negativity. Our language, they realized, is not neutral.

Later that day I watched my cross country team run a race. It was beautiful and so were they. My favorite part of running, though, is the cheering. Everyone cheers at running races. It doesn't matter what the person running believes in, who they vote for, or what football jersey they wear on Sunday afternoons. We should all be more like the crowds at running races, handing out water and screaming out "put ups," like "You look great!" "Keep going!" and "C'mon, you got this!!"

The stories of our names

do

not ever

be 

afraid to tell me

who you are.

i am going to find

out

eventually.

...

                   (Nayirrah Waheed)

Each year I begin my advisory by learning the stories of my student's names. Each student is assigned a day during which they spend the first few minutes of the morning describing to their classmates why their parents chose their name, where their last name originated, and any other meaningful elements they wish to share.

I love learning these stories. I love seeing who is proud of their name, who tells funny jokes or stories ("If I'd been I a boy..." or "My dad totally wanted to name me..."), and who loves their own name. I learn things about my students by the way they describe their names. I learn not just what they're called, but who they are.

And, truthfully, this is what the year's beginning is really about. It's the mutual dance of orientation through which a student and teacher go in developing a symbiotic relationship of trust and coexistence.

I edit papers, but they aren't graded.

"But do they count?" a student asks.

Of course they count, my child. Everything counts, doesn't it? But no, you won't earn a grade for this essay. This is about me learning how you write and you learning how I communicate. It's about me learning how I can work for you and you learning how you can work for me.

I assign homework and tests ( I call them "opportunities for success" to acknowledge that I understand the stress-inducing nature of that simple, mono-syllabic word: "test") but I remind them that I am the designer of both the assessment and the classes during which we review for it...that my job isn't to trick or bewilder...rather, my job is to simultaneously challenge and inspire, to empower and celebrate all that they know.

Today in World Cultures class my students and I watched a video about a culture in northeast India where children are given songs instead of names. It struck them as odd, but it was also so immediately beautiful. It made me wonder how those children's identities are formed, hearing every person they encounter in their village sing their name each day.

What if we approached our names, our identities, as being sung instead of spoken? Imagine how a child's sense of self would blossom if their parents created a song, inspired by the moment of love during which they first gaze at the child's face.

When the video finished, my students were sad. They made the connection that fewer and fewer children are being given songs for names today. They realized that, with westernization and modernization and globalization (terms they now know!!), the Americanized sense of manifest destiny, of rugged individualism, of upward mobility, and the pressure to thrive
and succeed
and do more
and be more
and...
and...
and...
all those things that my students are beginning to experience for themselves about "growing up" in America...

...those things are erasing the songs from children's identities.

I feel blessed to work at a school whose mission includes the aim that "...we value the imagination and curiosity of children and respect childhood as an integral part of life."

In the video, the narrator notes that "the songs [chosen for each child's name] have no meaning." We still sing songs here at my school. But more than any of the lyrics or traditions, I hope my students hear a melody in the ways they are known, the ways they identify themselves, and the ways they are valued here. The narrator, I think, was wrong: the songs that hum inside of children, and from the communities that love them, mean everything.

Rolling Deep

There's an expression that I first heard used when I was a freshman in college.

Any time the cross country team would be going somewhere in a group, one of the seniors on the team, Mike Kirkland (whose role of going out of his way to care for the underclassmen on the team earned him the friendly nickname, "Uncle Mikey"), would declare,

"Look at us...we are rolling deep!"

Now, over time I've learned that for many, the notion of "rolling deep" has a strong connotation to gang culture and to the reality that you have someone's back and someone else has yours. It's a term of protection, a term of belonging.

And, frankly, that historical connection is okay with me. Because that's what I felt, too, when Mike Kirkland used to pull me under his wing. As a freshman in college, he made me feel like I belonged. Mike wasn't a particularly talented runner on the cross country team. In fact, he never ran with the varsity team during a meet. But he was so integral to the identity of the varsity squad because he enabled us to feel a sense of connection we wouldn't have otherwise had. 

It felt good to roll deep. It felt good to feel as though we belonged. We had a unified purpose whenever we were together (even if that purpose was heading to get chicken parm at one of the campus dining halls after a late September practice of brutal hill repeats on Chipman Hill).

And I think of that in the fall. 

I think of that when I make my first connections with students...when no single assignment outweighs the value embedded in the rapport I begin to develop with each of the children who inhabit the desks in my classroom. I only have nine months to connect with these students, to make them feel a sense of belonging, and a kinship. 

I want them to know that as hard as I hope they will work for me this year, I want to work twice as hard for each of them.

I want, above all else, for them to feel a sense of connection to their classmates and to the shared opportunity to build a culture of curiosity and trust within the four walls of the classroom.

I want them to know that, if only for one academic year in the story of their lives, we are rolling deep together.

This week I saw this as students shared the stories of their names.

I saw it as they shared the cultures in which they feel the most like themselves.

And I saw it when we talked about the words we love, and the ways the words we use differ from the way the dictionary uses them (and, "Why, Mr. McDonough, is slang in 2018 so obsessed with heat?" (e.g. lit, roasted, fire, 🔥, et al.)

In all of those moments, as fun and interesting as they were, what I really wanted to say was this...

You belong here. This is your classroom. Your ideas are welcome and invited. They are the VIPs and the MVPs.

So "Let's roll." 

And while we're at it, why don't you all take the lead.