Okay, so I tagged this a bunch of different ways because when I saw this video of Dr. Karyn Purvis, I thought of SO MANY THINGS. I thought about one of our current foster children. I thought about the boy I picked up off the floor of the hallway yesterday morning, ripped away from his fellow combatant, and fairly tossed into my classroom. I thought about every student I've ever known that one or more of my colleagues had given up on. I thought of children that I had, when I was a less open-minded educator, given up on, myself.
Check out the video, I guess. Maybe then this will all make more sense. You see, I'm going to try to draw all of those threads together here, so I'm not sure just what the knot is going to look like. Maybe with five and a half minutes of background, we can stay on the same path without losing anyone. There's a bit of a religious undertone to her message, but even if that's not your bag, if you stay with her, I think you'll see something that's important and quite universal. Here's the vid:
Children from Hard Places from Tapestry on Vimeo.
As I listened to Dr. Purvis, co-author of The Connected Child, talking about children from hard places, I couldn't help but think of the kids I see in middle school. I thought of the ones I know who don't respond to what has always worked. I thought of the ones who respond antithetically to nearly everything their teachers do. They shut down when we try to build them up. They disengage when we reach for them. They feign apathy when we urge them to care for all the reasons we deem to be the right ones.
My campus has seen a change in its demographics over the last few years. What used to be a neighborhood school for the middle- to upper-class part of town has become a Title I school serving kids from all over the city. Some schools are homes to special programs in order to provide a magnet for students who would not have enrolled there otherwise. Our campus is a magnet by its very nature because we operate under an authentic RtI framework and because we have high expectations and because our teachers have always been able to inspire our students to reach them.
But now we have more and more kids who come from hard places. These are children who have grown up without what most of us would consider a childhood. We see kids who are raising their little siblings and cousins. We see kids whose only safety happens at school. But these kids bring their trauma with them. Their fear. Their doubt. All of the dark feelings that have been bred by a life filled with uncertainty, loss, injustice, insecurity, and pain. And then we want them to care about the structure of an atom, the Pythagorean theorem, the root causes of the Civil War, and where the comma goes.
And we are baffled when we do not reach them.
I ask you, do you see these children? Do you really see the child? Do you see a child for whom you need to unlearn what always worked when the kids came to school with the wide-eyed optimism of youth? Do you see his pain-riddled heart when he refuses to look you in the eye? Do you see her fear when she purses her lips and bows up against your authority?
The longer we rail against these children using what always worked as our only toolkit, the more of them we will lose. And we are losing them. We are seeing them give up. We are seeing them fight and refuse and posture in ways that, while everyone knows they are wrong, feel right to these children as they justify a response cobbled together from a near absence of knowledge of the social norms required in order to successfully navigate public education in the era of the standardized test.
So yeah, when I watched the video, I saw the little girl who is ours for the moment. The child who had been raising herself for most of the first year of her life that she has been able to walk upright and help herself to food, clothing, and whatever other necessities have felt appropriate to a child under the age of two. I think about how she has railed these past weeks against the structure our home demands, the expectations that guide us, and the lifestyle that is all our family has ever known. But then I think about a child who grows all the way up to middle school-age this way. What if our little girl had not met with the interventions she receives in our care? What kind of tween or teenager would she grow into? Would she be one of these children her teachers dismiss as unteachable? Or would she be lucky enough to get a teacher who chose to really see her - a child who comes from a hard place and who needs to be loved back into a society that let her grow up in a little hell on Earth?
I will look closer tomorrow. And every day hereafter. As I am teaching this little girl who is now a part of our family what it means to live among people who love you, I will let her teach me to see my students and account for the hard places from whence they come.
