Constructing Kasun, Educator

There are many reasons we teach, and one of them is magic.

I’d argue that if a teacher spends a lot of time thinking, “Wow, there’s real magic in my classroom,” that it’s time for the teacher to stop the navel-gazing.  Perhaps, however, that teacher has reached some level of self-actualization which I’ll never attain.  Either way, I’m indulging myself by describing the magic I had in a recent class.

I used a friend’s lesson idea about using six senses to describe an early memory.  My students had completed a graphic organizer, and then we read a short chapter from Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street called “Hair.”   We examined how she had used her senses in writing and then got busy.

My pen flew, and from time to time I looked up to watch my students.  They had about ten minutes to do a freewrite… Write like hell and turn the censor off.  Just get the words out, based on what they had already written in their five senses graphic organizer.  They wrote, and wrote, and wrote, past the ten minutes I had given them.  Finally, a few students seemed to have exhausted their ideas.  They sat.  In silence.  No one else got distracted.  Finally, most of the group was nearly finished, and their silence seemed sacred.

We shared.  One girl told us about how she was sure a girlfriend of hers had stolen her baby doll.  You could feel the other girl’s thick black hair as she yanked it in anger.  Other students shared telling details as well, and our senses tingled with their descriptions.  The students encouraged each other, telling them the unique strengths they found in the writing.  I thanked them for their seriousness and maturity in the exercise, and I so badly wanted to cry.  It was magic, after all.

What a disturbed gunman did a week ago today was wrong, inexplicable.  That goes without saying.
What angers me is that I hear little or no discussion about how a society can prevent such senseless acts of violence.  I’m not referring to the gun debate, either.  I’m talking about what happens when a people can’t take care of its own.

We live in a country where there is more than enough to meet our basic human needs, so why don’t we look a little deeper at our emotional needs?  How about a public debate on taking care of each other, on not casting out the outsider even more?  Can’t we just stop and talk about bullying at least?  Maybe if Cho hadn’t been picked on, maybe if enough people had shown that they cared about him, maybe he would have sought the help he so desperately needed.  Maybe he would have even found it in a caring community around him.

I discussed this notion with one of my classes.  I had sworn off lengthy discussions, but one young woman wrote about the tragedy as a journal entry and shared it with the class.  Perhaps because we’re in Virginia, close enough to the tragedy, several students’ sense of security was rattled.  So we talked about controlling our own media consumption and considered how that would be a good idea.  We also discussed why the U.S. is basically a safe place, where war-torn countries (like Iraq) are currently far less safe.  Then we discussed what we all can do–and, it’s simple.  We can care for each other.

One girl said, “Come on, everybody gets picked on.”  Not in every society, I told her, and not to the extent young people pick on each other here.  Several eyes looked down in shamed recognition of this fact.  I challenged my own students to look for ways to care for each other and cut out the teasing and bullying that has become so normal for them.

What I don’t understand is why this isn’t the discussion we’re having today.  What’s so threatening about it?  Or am I all wrong?  Or is it so simple that it won’t make for good soundbites and editorials?  If you’re reading along, please take the time to thin about my idea.  And if you agree with it, why not pass the idea along?