Why can’t the girls play soccer with the
boys?
‘Cause girls don’t know how to play.
Girls can play soccer!
Fine! Then tomorrow at recess we’ll see who beats
who.
And so it was
determined that, at recess, the boys of Mrs. B’s class would take on the girls
in soccer. Little did I realize how blown out of proportion the differences
between boys and girls would be when one entered the ‘territory’ of another.
Wednesday, March
26, 12:10pm, recess.
All 27 boys and
girls ran to the playground and promptly began a game of soccer. Everything
seemed fine as I walked up and down the playground checking in on kids here and
there, while keeping another eye on the game. It’s highly amusing to watch a school
of 27 children swarm around one
single ball. At one point, two balls were thrown in (mixed from another class),
which immediately triggered the commencement an entirely different, parallel
game.
Everything seemed
fine.
Until the boys started winning.
Gloating. Jeering.
Tantalizing. boys
Frustrated.
Wronged. Serious. girls
And then suddenly,
one girl, T, comes running straight to me, followed by a boy, K, whose sharpened
eyes unflinchingly follow the girl with every turn she makes – like a cougar
ready to pounce on prey. She runs behind me and says “K is trying to kick me!”
[ugh]
In my ‘protecting’
shadow, I stop K to talk to him.
“She kicked me
first! Five times!”
Apparently she had kicked him five times in the shin,
really hard. Highly uncharacteristic of T. I looked up then to see another
relatively tame girl jumping up and down in front of a boy screaming at the top
of her lungs and letting her hair fling everywhere in frustration. The boy,
trying to scream back, gets so overwhelmed that he shoves her away from him.
[Ah! Physical
contact! You do not ever shove somebody.]
B! You come here RIGHT now. You do NOT shove
ANYbody no matter how angry you get.
B comes. At this
point I call the entire class in for lunch. Recess is over.
Needless to say, it
was the loudest, most ruffled and wired up line that I have ever had to lead to
class. I told students that we would deal with the situation at lunch (since it
is a rigid rotation that the school must follow), and that we were not to speak
of it in the hallway. Nevertheless, some students’ desire to seek justice by
telling me their side of the story kept escaping its way from their mouths to
my ears.
And to be perfectly
honest, while I was walking down that hallway with them, I had absolutely NO
idea what I was going to do to restore social justice in this war that seemed
to involve almost every single person.
When you arrive in the cafeteria, you will
sit on the yellow table if you were involved in the soccer game. If you were
not, you will sit on the blue table. [still… I don’t know what I’m going to say…]
Looking to listen
to what individual people had to say – without the interjection of others
slamming me with their perspectives and their warped witness accounts – I would
often find myself getting to the root of the problem: who were they angry with,
why and what could be done in order to seek peace of mind between the two?
I talked
extensively to one student who had qualms with at least four people at the
cafeteria. Not entirely sure of what to do, I talked to this boy about what he
wanted to say to the girl, and set up a conference with the two at the
neighboring, empty blue table. Following suit, I set up three other conferences
at the neighboring tables, and allowed students to channel their thoughts and
feelings in a removed and individualized environment, where they weren’t egged
on or lost in the voices of others chiming in. Slowly, but very surely,
students started smiling with each other at tables and coming back ready to
talk to the next person, or settling down to eating a lunch, content.
We stayed in the
cafeteria an extra ten minutes until most students were done talking to each
other.
Yet another fear
still loomed over my head. How was I
going to describe this entire situation to the whole class so that this doesn’t
happen again? And how can I (attempt to) restore balance in the classroom after
such a charged recess and lunch?
“Please sit at your tables and put your
heads down,” began the
discussion.
Third-graders
always surprise me with their desire to restore order with their friends who
wrong them. It’s as if the thing that causes conflict in the first place is
their lack in ability to take perspective.
A solution that
everyone came up with was to communicate better.
How?
And then it hit me!
A solution! I passed out index cards to every student, where they would have
the opportunity to apologize to someone they knew they’d wronged, and had the
opportunity to voice their perspective and emotions to a particular situation.
This was all done in the safety of knowing that others were apologizing to them
as they apologized to others.
We missed a chunk
of science class, which I had to rush through and sacrifice some content
knowledge, but in the end, communication is such an invaluably big lesson that
it made everything worth it.
Also, while I know I
did not handle the situation perfectly, I am so surprised at my ‘teacher
ability’ to think on the spot like that; a characteristic of teachers that I
have always seen in awe. And it’s funny, because all you need to do is to shut
your awe-ing jaw, and to really think about what the children need to learn and
applying it directly to their lives in the hopes that they will become
ingrained in them as they venture into the real world.