Editor’s note: The story below is from a friend of the Institute for Educational and Social Justice. Some minor details have been changed to maintain both the teacher and student’s anonymity.
I entered my afternoon language arts class, eager to get my students to work.
Like every day in our elementary class, we had a lot to cover – the usual language arts grammar warm-up, followed by an introduction to plays. There also was a new writing assignment and a Jeopardy-style game to review concepts for an upcoming standardized test.
I’d been in meetings earlier in the week, where I was reminded of how much ground my students have to cover and how rigorous this year’s standardized tests will be. I was determined to push my students toward academic excellence – and to push hard. The idea left me excited about the possibility for student growth, and more than a little scared of what it might look like for all of us if my students fell short.
Things felt off kilter from the moment my band of students entered the room.
One student was pacing in the back of the room. Two others were insistent they needed to go to the nurse for phantom illnesses. (I managed to distract them from their imagined need – a concept they really should teach in Schools of Education nationwide.) Another was hanging upside down in his seat, opossum-like, his jacket over his head, awaiting his next assignment.
A lot was going on here, but I can’t claim that it was particularly unusual, either. This group of students is adorable, and funny – and also squirrely and active enough to make the Patron Saint of Calm more than a little edgy.
We moved into language warm-up. One of my students, a fellow I will call Alan, refused to do his work. This was unusual for Alan, a bright kid who constantly begs to be allowed to help me with “anything, anything at all” as soon as he is finished with an assignment.
I leaned over Alan, and touched him on the shoulder, “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” This suddenly sent Alan into a spiral of despair. I tried to talk to him more, but his reaction was to crawl under his desk, curl up in a ball and sob. He clearly wasn’t ready to talk. So I kept teaching.
Near the end of class, as my other students wrapped up a writing project, I went back to Alan and crawled under the desk to sit next to him.
He started sobbing and ranting – that he didn’t want to go home, that he hated his life, and that he thought everyone hated him. I reminded him of the people he had who loved him – and reminded him that I was a big fan of his, myself.
This made him cry even harder – possibly from relief, possibly from confusion. Whatever the cause, his crying was debilitating.
Soon, it was time for Alan’s class to return to their homeroom, and for my homeroom to return. Alan edged out from under his desk, but continued to sob.
Time was becoming my enemy. I had to get Alan on the bus line, and I really didn’t want to have an administrator do it, causing the boy even more stress.
Desperate, I got down on the floor next to him and pointed out the time. “You have three choices. You can get up on your own and walk to the bus line. Or, I can call an administrator and they can come and get you. The other choice is for me to pick you up.”
“I need you to pick me up,” Alan said, sobbing and in that moment looking as vulnerable as I have ever seen a child look.
“OK, Alan. But you need to know that you are heavy. And I’m not really that strong. So I can lift you up. But after that I’m going to need you to walk, OK?”
I pointed out then, that my homeroom class was in the room. “You are OK with these kids, including the boys, seeing me pick you up?”
“Yes. I need you to be the one to pick me up.”
And so I did.
I lifted that sobbing, shaking heap of a boy – wrestling with a storm of emotions I do not fully understand – up off the floor and moved him to the door.
He wiped his tear-stained face and made it to the bus line just in time – all without a single disparaging word from anyone in my homeroom class, which has more than a few kids who are concerned already about things like coolness and the notion that upper elementary boys probably shouldn’t cry or be lifted off the floor by their teachers.
I’m honestly not sure how well I covered my course material that day. But maybe that wasn’t the point. I think that on this particular day, the most important thing I did was lift Alan up off the floor and get him where he needed to be – all without yelling or threatening or belittling his emotions.
And those are the sorts of things that the standardized tests my students will take in the spring cannot possibly measure.
