Surviving June

The end of the school year is just around the corner and you're hanging on by your fingernails! You teachers are up to your eyebrows in evaluation, paperwork, and activities. And inexplicably, you are seeing behaviours in your classroom that you haven't had to deal with since September. What's going on?

As a staff member, you may be starting to mourn the loss of the group you have worked so hard to create. Or you may be starting to worry about next year's group. Maybe you are changing grades or schools. Maybe you are losing a colleague or friend who is moving on. You are experiencing the stress of transition. Hopefully, after all these years on this ever-changing planet, you have developed some strategies for dealing with change.

Meanwhile, your students may be starting to mourn the loss of the group they have grown so attached to. Or they may be worrying about next year's class. They are definitely changing grades and maybe even schools. Maybe a close friend is moving away or going to a different school next year. They are experiencing the stress of transition. And if no-one guides them, how will they ever learn any strategies for dealing with change on this ever-changing planet?

Many of the niggling annoying behaviours of June are about anxiety. Kids will experience high levels of stress when they know change is coming but can't yet picture the new situation clearly in their minds. Even kids who would tell you they are not thinking about next year at all, will experience the agitation that comes with subconscious awareness of upcoming transition. Part of the end of the year needs to be about facing the changes that are coming.

The last thing any of us want is to be "fighting" with our kids at the end of the year when we should be enjoying them. So what can we do to ease the time of transition for all of us? Most importantly, we must model to the kids how we are dealing with the transition. It's important to say out loud when we are feeling sad about the upcoming good-byes. To say out loud when we wonder what next year will be like, who will be here and who won't. To say out loud, every day if necessary, that change is hard, but change is good.

We need to say that we are all in transition, that it causes feelings, and that our feelings don't have to leak out into cranky little behaviours, they can go elsewhere; into conversations about change, about last year, about next year, about how we feel. They can go into telling each other what we have appreciated and enjoyed. They can go into pictures and notes and cards and games and songs and dances . . .

We are all exhausted and nothing is more tiring than the prospect of change. Name it - for yourself and for your students. Put it out in front of you where you can work with it, or it will likely sneak up behind you and bite you in the . . June.


Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."

Why I don't want to talk about Bullying

Well, this won't be popular, but I do not want to talk about bullying any more. 
The word bully (which meant "sweetheart" around 1530) has taken on so much emotional baggage in the last decade or so, that it has become skewed. It is no longer a tool of communication, but a weapon.
I don't want to talk about bullying because it divides us. I have spent my adult life trying to minimize and be mindful of the word "bad". Little kids tell me about "bad" kids at school and I look at them blankly and pretend I don't know what that means because "I never met a bad kid. We all make bad choices from time to time."
I once had a little guy roll up his pant leg and show me a spot on his calf. "I'm only good to about here," he said. "The rest of me is bad."
If you feel bad, you act bad. Label a kid "bully" and that is what you'll get. Label a kid a victim and that is what you'll get. If you tell kids we're splitting up into teams, they'll quickly suss out which team meets more of their needs and join up.
When you tell kids they must stand up to bullying, you are asking them to choose a team, drawing a line down the middle of the playground, or the team, or the classroom.
I am tired of watching kids throw these words out so they can watch the adults fly into overdrive without really looking at the situation. I can think of one specific situation where a student with really weak social skills (but who was making progress with coaching) started to get feedback from his peers about the way he conducted himself in friendships with much younger kids. The boy, whose behaviour could easily have been interpreted as bullying at times, went home and reported that he was being bullied by those peers who tried (sometimes inappropriately) to hold him accountable for his treatment of younger children.
As soon as the word "bullying" came into play, the young man so in need of coaching, was off-limits to staff for anything but protection from those "bullying" him. The family was all too happy to lay the blame elsewhere and ignore the obvious problems.
There is no "we" in bullying, just "us" and "them". Anyone else have alarm bells going off? Us and them is the beginning of everything destructive in our society. We have a problem with how our children treat one another and we are not going to solve it by finding ways to constantly push away personal responsibility.
So, if we are going to get to Us, let's start with Me.
I am 47 years old and I have been a bully and a victim and everything in between. I am capable of selfless compassion, self-absorption, and careless cruelty. To ensure that I am never engaging in behavour that hurts others or myself, I choose to think of my behaviour in these terms: aggressive, assertive, passive.
Ideally, I want to be living in my own little bubble of assertiveness. That means (to me) that my bubble moves through my world with me safely in it. When I am beginning to impede the space of someone else (lack of awareness? bad day?), then the assertive person in the next bubble will simply let me know that I'm taking up more than my fair share of the available space. Oops, sorry, I say, and roll my bubble over a little. When the proximity of someone else's bubble makes me feel squished, I speak up and tell them, kindly, to move over.
Why can't this language replace the bully lexicon with older kids? Why can't we talk about the fact that we are always "behaving" and that the key to happiness is finding a balance and trying to monitor your own behaviour as much as possible. Accepting the nudges of others graciously is part of growing up - learning social skills. Understanding that we are all capable of all behaviours is the core of our compassion. Working together to create harmony is the essence of community. There is no community in "us" and "them".
When we find an inequality of balance, we need to investigate where it comes from. Aggressive kids are trying to meet a need. What is it? And how do we help them meet that need in a more appropriate way? How are we helping the aggressive child by shining the "bully" spotlight on them? When we do, we are likely exacerbating whatever created the behaviour in the first place.
I don't want to talk about bullying when there are better things to talk about. I want to talk about teaching the positive curriculum of human kindness. Let's spend money on Roots of Empathy and Zones of Regulation and the Focus Kit, to name only three of scores of curricula available to help kids develop compassion, self-awareness, and self-regulation.
Right now in our little school the grade 3,4,5 teacher and the school counsellor are delivering lessons to that class from the Zones of Regulation teaching program. The sense of community is actively nurtured every day in various ways. Built on this crucial foundation, discussions are developed regarding our feelings and how we help ourselves move from one "zone" to the next. And because there are no bad guys and good guys, everyone feels safe to explore their own strengths and vulnerable spots.
To address the little flickers of "bullying" behaviour that arise, the adults have been talking about aggressive, assertive, and passive behaviours with this analogy: Keep your remote control safely with you at all times. Don't leave it laying around so anyone can pick it up and push your buttons (passive), and never push the buttons on someone else's remote (aggressive). You are in charge of your remote. If you see one lying around, return it to the owner (You look like you're in the yellow zone. Don't forget to keep control of your remote. Why don't we go play?) If you see someone playing with someone else's remote, you could try to help or you could let an adult know.
What's important here is that everyone has a remote, everyone is tempted to play with one they don't own from time to time, and everyone is responsible for their own. They all made cardboard remotes of their own design, and a poster in the classroom reminds them to keep their remote in their pocket and don't push anybody else's buttons.
Punishing bullying behaviour is not working. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Time to start looking a little deeper.
Please don't take my compassion for aggressive kids to mean that I am unaware of the suffering of victims. Quite the contrary. When I worked at the Regional Support Centre for at-risk kids, our clientele was 90-95% male. At the same time that I worked there, my partner worked at a program helping sexually exploited youth transition out of the sex trade, with 99% of the clientele female.
It was an interesting time at our house. My partner would come home raving about the perpetrators (largely male) who had caused so much agony and destruction in the lives of these girls. Meanwhile, I had spent my day with aggressive males, trying to help them correct  patterns of behaviour before they became the men my partner was talking about. But guess what? Many of those boys had been abused in a myriad of hair-raising ways. We saw the cycle played out in front of us every day. And in those environments, using flimsy terms like bully and victim took us nowhere. We needed words like physical and emotional safety, stability, self-respect, trust, and healthy communication.
And since this has turned into a full-on rant, let me end with this: where do kids learn how to behave?
They take what they see around them, and apply it to how they are feeling in the moment. So, if a child lives in a home where one parent dominates the other, what do you expect? If a child lives in a community where the haves manipulate and exploit the have-nots, what do you expect? If a child lives in a city or province where leaders use aggression and intimidation to wrest control from one another, what do you expect?
Calling our kids "bullies" is a pretty dishonourable way of avoiding the screaming inequalites in our society.
Take this post for what it is; an opinion and - despite my title -  an invitation to dialogue.


Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."

Writer Me

I am, like so many of us, living in a couple of different worlds. In my case, I am a teacher on some days and a writer on others. How we integrate our various worlds is a very individual thing. Mine is interesting because while they overlap completely in terms of my main interest - people - my time spent with each practice is clearly delineated.
When I am teaching - while I am soaking up what I observe in terms of human interaction - the main part of me must be completely present to do my job well. And when I am writing, the teacher part of me must be dismissed (as much as possible) to allow the writer to move in a less linear fashion, exploring the raw data collected by Teacher Me.
Both worlds require and nurture creativity in their own way.
But I digress.
What I really wanted to tell you is that I have managed a rare and precious immersion into my writer's world. Are you at a costly workshop, you ask. Nope. Did you pay to go to a retreat? Perhaps go through the rigorous application process for a subsidized retreat? No, again.
A while back, I was complaining to my one friend who cannot listen to whining without coming up with some sort of plan; while I do appreciate that I can work part time and have time left over to write, what I longed for, I told her, was a block of time to immerse myself in my writing. To not answer the phone, chop wood, trim ferns, do laundry, plan dinner, think of excuses for not vacuuming or leave the project for a day (or more) of teaching and then have to find my way back in again. 
My friend, the problem-solver, said, "Why don't you try house-sitting?"
Eureka!
I joined a house-sitting website and here I am.
Welcome to my one-week writing retreat. I am in a lovely house in a beautiful neighbourhood. (Can you hear the ocean? It's right there!) There is no phone here, no TV. There is a grocery store within walking distance, and two charming little Westies named Enzo and Bailey for company. They like to walk, cuddle, nap, eat, cuddle, and walk. And nap. Enzo likes when I read to him but Bailey is more interested in processing with me. I mutter aloud all day as I work and often catch him nodding sagely. Well, maybe I imagined the nodding, but he is definitely listening. As an added bonus, I have made two new human friends, as well.
Here, I never have to leave my work. I think about my characters as we walk around the neighbourhood or down to the beach. I imagine them here in this environment. I imagine running into them. When we return home, I can feed the dogs and myself without ever really exiting the fictional world.
All this, for the price of a bus ticket.
So, my writer friends, something to think about. Have laptop; will travel.
I 'm not sayin, I'm just sayin . . .

Perfect Child

The other day when I taught the grade 3,4,5 class, I got to spend a bit of one-to-one time with a particular student. She tends to stay to herself so I don’t know her as well as some of her more outgoing classmates. As I was chatting with her and marvelling at her humour and insight, I suddenly had a flash of this same little girl in kindergarten. She was rolling around on the floor while the rest of the children were sitting in a circle, singing. At each invitation to join, she made her disdain abundantly clear and carried on with her rolling.

Every time I noticed her that year she was doing her own thing, to say the least. I felt anxious just watching her, but I distinctly remember the kindergarten teacher’s response when I asked about that little bundle of wild. The teacher, Dayna, filled my ear with how great that little girl was and how much she loved this, that, and the other thing about her amazing personality and on and on it went. I looked back at the little girl lying prone in the middle of the classroom. “Right,” said I.

And now I get it. When I look at the nine year old version, I see everything Dayna could see – and I could not – in the five year old version.

There are two points to this story. The first is an ode to one of the most amazing Early Childhood Educators I have ever worked with. Dayna always fills my ears with how wonderful and amazing and unique and creative and brilliant her students are. (While we watch them lick sticks or shove spoons down their pants.) When I substitute in her classroom, I spend the whole time doing head counts and rubbing my fingers nervously over the pile of bandaids in my pocket. I can’t do what she does. I can keep them safe and happy and maybe they’ll do some learning if I stay out of their way, but I will never be able to do what Dayna does.

My second point is that there is a perfect child in every student we work with. That is the version of the child that the parent is referring to when they are mystified by your version. Sometimes that version is blindingly bright, sometimes it’s carefully camouflaged, but a parent can always see the perfection.

So how do teachers keep the vision of that perfect child in the midst of a large group of challenging and demanding personalities? As a teacher, is there a “magic” age for me? An age at which I, like Dayna, can see all the potential and possibility when I look at a student?

There are days when the five year olds make me nervous and the teenagers make me tired but eight to ten year olds almost always make me want to play. The way they learn fascinates me, the way they try on new personalities and discard them like mittens fascinates me. The way they teeter between egocentricity and boundless compassion fascinates me. The way they want to work as much as they want to play. The way they cautiously reach for independence but still want to please you . . . it all fascinates me.

Is the age that fascinates you the age you should teach? Or is it just the age you’ll find most enjoyable? Were you thinking I would have answers for these questions? Nope.

But here’s to all the teachers, like Dayna, who look at a child and see their best self; who inspire each child to be their best self. And here’s to the perfect child still residing in each one of us.

Apparently, mine is nine and a half years old.

Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."