Hug Your Children

I was mentally referring to myself as childless the other day and then I realized that is wrong.  I have hundreds of children.

Today twenty children who were very precious to their mothers, fathers, grandmothers,
teachers. . . were shot and killed in a school shooting along with seven of their teachers.

When something terribly tragic like this happens (and it happens so often now) the instinct of any parent is to want to hug their children.

I found out about this tragedy today while I was at school, via whispers from another teacher.  I had no intention of telling the kids - better they hear about it from their own parents if they are old enough for it to be appropriate.  Not a minute later I had two happy four-year-olds on my lap, so it was a cinch to give hugs all around. I am not childless - my life is overflowing with children.

The four-year-olds and I were spectators at a glow-in-the-dark fashion show, wearing highlighter bracelets that shone under the black light and cheering as twenty girls pranced down the "runway" made of tables in their hand-sewn outfits. And everyone was so very vibrantly alive.

Earlier today I accompanied a group of students to visit an archeological dig at an Underground Railroad site, an old Albany house that is being restored into a museum.  We pawed through mud and looked at old pottery shards, a tobacco pipe, and a gunflint.  The kids climbed piled of dirt and peered down into holes.  And everyone was so vibrantly alive.

That house hosted formerly enslaved fugitives who were on their way to Canada in the 1840's and 1850's.  Corey, the head archeologist, who is also the husband of a teacher at my school, told us about the African-American people who owned and lived in that house, and their neighbors.  He told us about all the work they did providing food, shelter, and clothing.  We saw a bulletin from the meetings of their Fugitive Aid Society.  Corey encouraged us to think of them not as stiff formal people from a stuffy era, but as social activists.  He encouraged us to think of the enslaved people escaping as activists, too - people who worked to author their own destiny.

Gun violence kills children every day in this country.  In Chicago alone 24 children were fatally shot during the 2011-2012 school year, 28 in 2010-2011.  319 children were wounded by gunfire in Chicago last year.

As a teacher who has worked in neighborhoods plagued by gun violence, I want people to acknowledge that gun violence does not only happen to children during high-profile mass shootings.  In some communities it happens every day, although a lot less attention is paid. And every single child who is a victim of gun violence was precious to their mother, father, grandmother, teacher. . .

When I worked in Woodlawn, in Chicago, I arrived at school one day during my first year of teaching to find the window broken.  A shoot-out between rival gang factions had taken place in front of the school the night before - thankfully no one was at school.  Police found over a hundred shell casings on the ground.  My students found the bullet later that day, where it had ricocheted off the ceiling and landed in the corner.  I kept it for a long time as a reminder that things can always get worse, and that no matter how rough the day was, at least we were all still alive to try again tomorrow.

A few years later when I worked at Amandla, we had to keep the kids inside at the end of the day because of a shooting reported down the block.  One boy complained about having to stay in, and our vice principal told him, "I am trying to protect you from bullets.  I am not about to let you go out there and get shot."  And the boy replied, "this is Englewood.  This shit happens every day." I still think about him a lot, about where that resignation came from and whether it could ever be undone.

When a gun goes off no one in its vicinity is the author of their own destiny any more.  But in the wake of such events, and among them, we must still try to build the communities that will heal us, and the citizens - adults and children - that can heal our communities. 

A Day in the Life - Teacher

Cutting a sewing pattern for glow in the dark fashion show.

I arrive at school at 8:20, running a bit late even though my commute is only ten feet - my back yard adjoins the playground.  I have a cup of coffee in hand and I load up on breakfast - mini bagels, fried eggs, apples, and leftover bread pudding from yesterday's lunch.

All around me kids are eating breakfast in the upstairs big room and when the are done, the littler ones climb on the indoor jungle gym.  The bigger kids go downstairs and play magic cards, finish homework, or just talk.

At 8:45 I begin breakfast cleanup, which is my job today.  I clear abandoned dishes and wash the tables before folding them up and stacking them on the side of the room.  The room will become a cafeteria again at lunch.  I sweep the floor and am greeted excitedly by an arriving three year old who shouts, "Lauren!" whenever he sees me.

At 8:55 I duck into the office to photocopy a set of problems for junor high class, then I head up to their loft room for class.  Six of nine kids are present - one is sick and two are late, which is an unfortunately common problem with students this age.

We are solving problems related to extending patterns and writing algebraic rules for the nth term.  Here is one: a series of pictures of L-shaped arrangements of squares.  The first pattern uses 1 square, the second figure 3 squares, then 5 and so on.  What is the rule for the nth term?  Everyone sees that it goes up by 2 each time.  Putting it in terms of a variable is tougher.  Do we multiply by 2? That gives even numbers, we want odd numbers.  We don't finish all the problems- we will pick them up again tomorrow.  Some students entrust their paper to me for safe keeping.

On my way downstairs to prepare for my fourth grade class, I pass a crying four-year-old.  He is lying on the floor under a table.  He weeps for the spider man costume he wants to wear, which today is being worn by another boy.  I pull him into my lap.  Kids that age are grappling with the reality that they don't always get what they want.  Nothing upsets them more than scarcity.  I try to encourage him to empathize - won't the other boy be so happy to have a chance to wear the costume? He grudgingly admits this but is still sad.  All I can do is repeat, I know you are sad over and over until he calms down.  Some adults have a saying, "you get what you get and you don't get upset," but here it is more like "you get what you get and it's okay to be upset." I remind him that he will get the costume again on other days, but the concept of other days is hard when you are four.

Fourth grade class begins with multiplication tables, and then we work on extending patterns.  These are much simpler than the ones the junior high students are working with.  The students write the next few terms of a pattern on a whiteboard slate.  Then I let them take turns inventing patterns for other students to extend, which is more mathematically provocative than I had imagined it would be.  Some of their patterns are not fully determined - if they only give the first few terms it is impossible to differentiate between a repeating pattern and one that keeps increasing.  I don't force this vocabulary on them, it emerges naturally in the conversation. Math with groups of students so small tends to be more conversational. There are only five kids in class today out of seven - the other two have gone to the school's land in rural Grafton to have a day in the woods.

I end class by showing them the Fibonacci sequence, which stumps them good. I tell them they can keep pondering it until tomorrow. At the end of class they decide to research it, rushing to the computers to google it. They come to the Wikipedia article and try to make sense of its adult notation. One student finally makes sense of the recursive connection between the terms. They are excited by their discovery and try to stump another teacher.

Ordinarily after fourth grade class on Thursdays I would have a brief class with the kindergarten and first graders, but most of them are at Grafton. I hunt for the two girls who stayed at school and find one of them in the art room.

The room is all a-bustle because students are preparing for the project runway fashion show tomorrow. The theme is "glow in the dark," no I am not kidding. Students pin, hot glue, and sew skirts and wrap-type-things with varying levels of skill and glitter. Glow-in-the-dark paint is being liberally applied. The kindergartner I want to do math with is working with modeling clay.

I ask if she wants to practice counting and she enthusiastically agrees. We are joined a few minutes later by her first grade sister who is already an adept counter. I have noticed that teaching kids to count is surprisingly difficult. There are all kinds of unforeseen difficulties. This particular girl tends to count in the correct order, adhering rigidly to a rhythm with her voice while her finger jumps all over the page so that she arrives at an incorrect number.

Yesterday we practiced by having me dole out marbles while she counted them. I doled them out at a maddeningly irregular pace and reminded her again and again not to count the marble until I put it on the cloth. She seemed to make the connection after a little while but today we are back to square one. Sometimes she counts a single dot twice. Sometimes she skips dots. We are still practicing.

At 12:10, after about twenty minutes of counting, we hear the lunch bell sound. Everyone rushes to put away what they are doing and runs up the stairs to lunch. We eat curry potatoes and chickpeas, corn bread, carrots, apples, and cabbage salad. Plus leftover enchiladas from yesterday. An eclectic, satisfying lunch.

I eat at a table with whatever adults aren't busy helping kids with their food. Today the conversation centers on some junior high students who didn't seem to be taking much ownership for their learning or their behavior toward others. Bhawain, their teacher, is frustrated and despite many talks with these students and in some cases their parents, things don't seem to be changing. Junior high years are challenging everywhere.

 As I finish my lunch a four year old comes over to me as he does every day and asks if we can go on the computer when I am done eating. The kids love to play games with letters and numbers on the Starfall website. The hard part of using the computer is taking turns and the same boy who was crying earlier over the Spiderman costume cries again because he doesn't get to go first. I hold him in my lap again and we play with miniature animals while he waits for his turn on the computer. We make a herd of nine zebras and he acts out battles between a dolphin and a bear.

I often stay with the preschool kids for the whole afternoon but today I go back up to the junior high loft to have some students complete a make-up quiz.  The quiz is about solving equations.  The girls alternate between working earnestly and mock-whispering in a joking attempt to distract each other.  We round out the last few minutes of the day with parodic dancing to melodramatic music - they dance, I am a spectator.  Hair is flinging everywhere and by the end everyone is laughing hard.  Another girl comes up to get her things from her locker and the dancing girls bump and jostle her playfully.  I have a feeling that reminds me a lot of how I felt in school growing up, that the purpose of all of us coming together in the school building was partly to learn but also partly to keep each other company.

After school I have a few minutes of relaxation before we began our staff meeting, late as always.  Our meetings are always very long, this one especially so.  There is a lot to talk about because the school does not have any administrators - all administrative tasks are done by teachers, although everyone does not necessarily do the same amount of work.

We talk about snacks and finding a Santa for the holiday party. We talk about Deirdre's kitchen project to make gingerbread houses next week and whether it would be possible to make egg-free icing for a student with an allergy.  We talk about the ongoing struggle to get parents to pay tuition on time.  We talk about how to best communicate with a three-year-old boy who is deaf in one ear, and what to do about an incident of racist teasing that targeted an Asian-American student.  All of these conversations are long and detailed - since many staff members have after-school jobs this is the one time each week when we are all available to talk to each other.

Then we do our weekly check-ins about how the kids are doing.  Each teacher shares about their homeroom students and there are usually several issues to discuss.  This week we spend a long time revisiting the junior high kids we had talked about during lunch.  Bhawain, their teacher, still feels frustrated but is ready to move from the venting phase of the conversation into problem-solving.  We talk about Monday's council meeting.  Many staff members were unhappy with the motion students passed and feel that the issue was symptomatic of a larger problem with a lack of respect and caring from certain students.  This problematic group of junior high students has been involved in lying, unsafe roughhousing, ignoring younger kids who ask them to quiet down, disturbing classes, having inappropriate conversation with younger kids around, etc.  It is suggested to have another council meeting about these issues, where we would also invite students to speak up about the things these older students are doing that are bothering them.  Many teachers feel this might need to a long meeting because the students in question are not eager to talk or to acknowledge the ways their behavior is harming others. We talk about what we as adults might want to say in the meeting but also about how it is detrimental to have adults control too much in council meetings.

And then it is 7:00 pm and the staff meeting still isn't over.  While I certainly feel that our meetings could probably be more efficient, I am glad that everyone is willing to take the time to have the conversations about the emotional well-being of individuals and our school community.  It is difficult to know how to reach young adolescents sometimes but no one is giving up.

I finally get home at 7:45.  Thursdays are the longest days by far, on other days I come home at 3:45.  I eat crackers and salami for dinner and drink bourbon out of a coffee mug since I don't own a proper whiskey glass. I am tired and a little bit wired from the long meeting.  I do not dread tomorrow.  I remember to put my glow-in-the-dark nail polish in my bag.  I have promised it to some fashion designers.

Conflict and Council Meetings

This morning I sat on the floor for twenty minutes while a six-year-old chairwoman led some fifty of us, teachers and students alike, in an important meeting.  We were assembled to figure out what to do about graffiti etched in a bathroom window saying that a fourth-grade student "sucks."  And we were going to stay in the meeting until the insulted student felt satisfied that the problem was resolved.

In other schools, adults might badger those suspected of writing the insulting words, or compare the handwriting.  Or, unable to establish a culprit, teachers might lecture the class or just throw up their hands and do nothing.  Or permission to use the bathroom might be regulated more tightly to give troublemakers fewer opportunities.

None of those things happened in this meeting.  The adults spoke very little.  A culprit was not established, nor did anyone confess.  And at the Free School, the only time anyone ever needs permission to go to the bathroom is during one of these meetings, and they have to ask the chairperson, another student.

The motion that was made and voted into policy by the students was that everyone will have to take a turn cleaning the bathroom until whoever did this fesses up.  The schedule will be created by the student who was insulted by the graffiti.  This motion was made by an eighth grade student and there was little dissent, only some healthy debate about the specifics.

Welcome to a council meeting.

I mentioned briefly in an earlier post that when students have a conflict, one mechanism that the Free School uses to solve it is an all-school council meeting.  Now that I have had a chance to see a few of these in action, I want to tell you more about them.

Students have a lot of freedom and are often relatively unsupervised at the Free School.  Teachers are always nearby but with the exception of pre-schoolers, kids can be in classrooms by themselves, can play on the playground without an adult, and if they are fourth grader or older, can go in a group to nearby parks without a teacher.

Conflicts are inevitable in any school setting but in the Free School there often aren't adults immediately present to squelch them.  And even if adults are in the room, their first course of action is to stand back, watch, and see how the kids do.  Students are empowered and expected to solve conflicts on their own.

If students are unable to work it out themselves, they can approach a teacher, who coaches a student on how to handle it themself.  I might say, "tell him how you feel about that," or "talk to him about what you want in this situation." Often after a little coaching students can then work it out, no further adult intervention necessary.

If they still haven't solved it, students can ask for a mediation.  The students and a teacher get together privately and the teacher helps to mediate the situation.  Sometimes older students do mediations with younger students too.  Mediations aren't about adults telling kids how to work things out or assigning blame.  My role in a mediation is just to help the kids talk to each other more productively.

If a mediation doesn't work or a student doesn't want a mediation, another possible step is a council meeting.  Students will sometimes skip mediation if they have repeated conflicts on the same issue or with the same person, or if the problem is a whole-school issue.  It is always the student's decision whether they want a mediation or prefer a council meeting.  Teachers can also call council meetings.

Council meetings are a big deal because the whole school has to drop everything they are doing and get together right then and there, so they are called infrequently - about once or twice a week.  Unlike most activities at the Free School, they are mandatory - if you skip one, you are sent home for the day.  The kids enforce attendance upon one another. 

Here are some examples of reasons we have had council meetings this year:

*Some fifth and sixth grade girls were engaged in cliquish behavior that made another friend uncomfortable.
*Two junior high girls got mad at a classmate for telling on them when they had gum and candy.  They called him names and several adults and students were upset about this.
*A fourth grade girl and a fifth grade boy got into an argument about sharing art supplies.  He called her names and they yelled at each other.
*A teacher was upset because students had not been completing their lunch clean-up jobs in a timely fashion.

A council meeting begins with nominations for a student chair to lead the meeting. The chair then asks who called the council meeting and what the problem is that led them to call for a meeting. If the problem is a conflict between two students, both students tell their side of the story.

In schools where I have worked before, calling students out on misbehavior was always difficult. Kids tend to lie and become defensive to avoid getting in trouble, and as an adult it was my job to try to get kids to own up and take responsibility. I sometimes didn't know whether to trust a kid or whether they were lying. I often didn't have time in a classroom of 25 kids to maintain the conversation long enough to diffuse defensiveness and get to the real heart of the matter - sometimes my conversations were more expedient than productive.

Council meetings establish accountability in a completely different framework. Kids are more likely to be honest because there are not punishments at stake. Students are not only accountable to adults - they hold each other accountable as a community. They push for the truth and question details of a story that don't make sense.  They publicly empathize with one another, affirming that they know how an injured student must feel.  They take each other's problems seriously and they expect everyone else to do the same. When faced with the social pressure of the whole school, most kids who are on the receiving end of council meeting scrutiny drop the defensiveness and try to make the situation better.

Sometimes the exact details of what happened or who did what aren't necessary to know, because the focus of the council meeting is how to solve to problem. Students ask each other, "what will solve this problem?"  and "does this solve your problem?"  The answer to the last question has to be affirmative before the meeting can end.

Voting for a chairperson

Sometimes our butts get really sore from sitting on that floor.  Sometimes there is a long, awkward silence while the six-year-old chairwoman tries to remember an older kid's name to call on them.  Today there were dozens of those silences.  Sometimes a kid talks to much.  Sometimes someone makes a suggestion that seems like a bad idea from my adult perspective.  But this is what democracy looks like and at the end of the meeting, everyone is grateful that their struggles are not only theirs alone.