I often wonder just how much peace my students experience at home. It seems to be an inverse relationship: the more troubled the behavior, the less peaceful the home. A colleague tells of a home visit that sounds absolutely horrifying: two loud televisions in one room, one with sports and the other with some movie, a loud boom box in a nearby room, someone sticking his head in to yell "When's dinner?!", and all the while, the conversation continues about the student's performance and not once does an adult offer to turn down any of the noise.
"They're surrounded by noise, by motion, by stimulation," another colleague mentions during lunch. "It's no wonder they can't sit still, can't focus."
Not to mention what they consume in the name of food.
I have a rough class before lunch, and when we return from lunch, twenty minutes remain until the next class change. I work on social skills with them; I let them relax a while if they've worked well during class time; but most often, I try to give them peace. I turn the lights off, instruct them to put their heads down -- why is it they won't put their heads down when told but at least one every day wants to put her head down during class time? -- and simply stop. Stop moving, stop talking, stop shaking a leg or beating a finger on the desk. Just stop. Take a moment to collect themselves.
Most of them can't do it.
I try to play soft music for them, but I wonder if, obsessed as they are with rap "music," the classical music I play for them might be exhausting. They might not even know what a melody is, and if that's the case, they can't find much pleasure in classical music. Add to it their painfully short attention spans and it becomes rather obvious that they can't trace out the development of a musical theme, let alone notice when it repeats and begins morphing as it does in Romantic and Classical (as in the period, not the genre) music. I find Haydn works best, better than just about anything else.
Fast forward a couple of hours. K, E, and I have dinner together. What a blessing just to have dinner together. What a blessing that the Boy loves veggies. What a blessing that we had an entire zucchini to feed him.
After dinner, we go to the newly-paved street across from our house. K rides the scooter; the Boy coasts around on his whatever-it's-called. They bump each other, chase each other, goof around. I take the pictures.
After riding, Nana and Papa bring the Girl back and everyone sits a while and talks, rides bikes, fusses, cries, laughs.
After bath, after snacks, the kids lie on the bed with K who reads a new book from the library, translating the English to Polish to provide the kids with more exposure to the language.
"Co to jest 'snooty'?"
"Go with snobby," I say.
What do all these vignettes have in common? A peace that comes with a family spending time as a family. A peace that I'm not sure some of my students can even imagine.
Today was it. I do honestly like you all; I do honestly believe in your abilities and your intelligence; I do honestly see in you potential. But you all don’t see it in yourself, and because of that, you disrupt. Constantly. We’ve been in school three weeks now, and you’ve shown me that when given the chance to act like adults, you act like infants: you fuss about infantile things, you laugh uproariously and chaotically about infantile things; you fight over infantile things; you talk constantly about infantile things. You’ve shown me you’re just not ready to be treated like adults. What this means is that I must treat you like children. I must seem harsh in order to protect you, from yourselves and from your self-destructive habits. And so tomorrow, though I don’t really want to, I will be putting my foot down. That’s a cliche that doesn’t really adequately explain just how hard I’m going to hit you all tomorrow, so to speak. I expect to send at least ten students – that’s fully one third of you – to the assistant principal for being disruptive, because I’m going to define “disruptive” in such a harsh way that sneezing might get you sent from the room. I do this because you can’t handle the slightest amount of freedom: one off-hand comment to a peer turns into complete chaos in the class in a matter of seconds. One giggle sets ten others giggling. You are lemmings, robots – your behavior is so predictable. And so I am going to make my behavior equally predictable.
