I have been thinking about starting a blog for quite some time and today I decided to actually start writing. I was going to start off with something light and (hopefully) funny about my job. But my job is often funny, and, given the events of the day, I think I’ll start with something more serious instead.
Two things you should know:
1. I am a dance teacher.
2. Today there were explosions at the finish line of the Boston marathon.
A couple months ago I went through an incredibly challenging experience in one of my classes. The girls in this class were not getting along. They were having major issues with friendship and exclusion, with mean words and hurtful actions. It was catty and horrible and it made me want to scream. Each week, I would hear students say:
“I don’t want to stand next to her.”
“That girl hurt my feelings.”
“I don’t want to hold her hand.”
“You’re not my friend.”
Oh yeah... this was a class for 3 & 4 year olds.
At first, I tried using the line “In this class we’re all friends.” But something about that didn’t quite sit right with me. I don’t choose to be friends with every person I meet. Not even if we take the same class. Why should it be different for these little girls? Besides, the “we’re all friends” method wasn’t working at all. The problem was getting worse.
And we weren’t doing very much dancing.
Instead, the girls were disagreeing, crying, pointing fingers, and stubbornly refusing to get along.
I was racking my brain for ways to solve the problem. I sat the whole class down to talk about treating each other nicely. I had one on one talks with the students who were saying mean things and with the students who were crying. (This changed from week to week. The girl who refused to hold hands with someone one week would be crying that someone didn’t want to be her partner the next.) I talked about my frustrations. I discussed the situation with the parents of the students and asked for ideas, advice, ANYTHING that might help solve this problem.
I felt like nothing was working.
All of the kids agreed that it hurt their feelings when someone said they didn’t want to be their friend or hold hands or be partners with them.
All of the kids agreed that it was not nice to hurt someone else’s feelings.
Yet they all continued to have moments where they were mean to others or hurt by others or not able to understand why students were being mean/getting hurt.
This story doesn’t have a tidy ending. This class has trouble getting along. They are still learning. I am still learning. But I think I have a better idea of what the lesson is.
It isn’t that we all need to be friends.
It isn’t that we all need to get along all the time.
I think the lesson is this:
Our feelings are important. But so are everyone else’s. And no matter how we feel, it is not ok for our actions to deliberately cause harm to someone else.
I don’t understand what happened today in Boston or why events like this seem to happen all too often. I can only hope that I am teaching my students to be kind and compassionate and to see how their actions affect other people. I hope that I am giving them the tools they need to solve problems without being hurtful or violent. And I hope that no matter what challenges my students bring, I will work to find the lesson and the best ways to teach it to them.
