We do this project at Timothy in second grade where the kids make a model of a community. We look into the differences and similarities between places that are rural, urban, and suburban. The kids bring in recycled materials to think up and build their own skyscrapers, subdivisions, and silos. Then we have a painting day in the art room and all hell breaks loose. It's an adorable, fun, messy, and wonderful project that I had no hand in planning: my team just told me how to do the whole thing and I followed suit. It's great.
One of the elements, though, of the unit, is a questionnaire that we give the students about what kind of project they would prefer to create. It's good to have a variety of models in one classroom, so we try to see if at least a few kids want to make one of the three types of communities. I'm all for this. One element of this questionnaire, though, of which I was skeptical, was the part where each student could choose three friends that they would prefer to have in their group. I hate stuff like that. As an elementary teacher, one of my personal goals for my classroom is that it is a place where no long-term emotional scarring takes place. I've heard too many stories from people my age and older who still remember the time they were shamed for X, Y, or Z by the teacher, or remember examples of pure human evil in the form of recess time and dodgeball. I'd really rather not have my kids talking to their therapist as twenty-somethings, saying "Well, that one time, we did this group project in Mrs. Whartnaby's class and nobody picked me! I've felt isolated and alone ever since!"
So, before I passed out the questionnaires, my class and I had a long, serious talk about how we show love in this classroom and that anybody's name we choose to write down needs to stay anonymous. (We defined anonymous first, though, obvi.) Because, you know, of the feelings. And the therapy.
So we filled out the questionnaires and I collected them and then it was the weekend. I finally got to my stack of papers on Sunday afternoon, as I am often want to do, and was pretty stinking pumped when I read the results. Can I tell you what I saw? EVERY KID IN MY CLASS HAD THEIR NAME CHOSEN FOR A GROUP. Not one kid in the room was lacking for a group member who picked him or her. Now, I know that all of God's children are precious, but don't you dare tell me that His children aren't quirky. And just like any class of kids, we definitely have our quirks. We have the socially different, the caller-outers. the aggressive, the passive, the shy, the dominators, and the clumsy. And yet each child, in spite of their inevitable quirks, had another in the room who deemed them worthy of being chosen.
On Monday morning, when I told them about their group assignments, I couldn't wait to tell them. GUESS WHAT SCHOLARS! YOU WERE ALL PICKED! Each and every kid had a sheepish smile creep along their face as they glanced around the room, wondering who had picked them, and then the glorious grin that occurred when it doesn't make a difference who wrote whose name down: the point remained that it was written! When everyone gets picked, everyone wins.
I just couldn't help but mentally draw all the delicious parallels to the other, most important way that all kids are picked and chosen: by their creator, long ago, to be fearfully and wonderfully made, for a real and significant reason. They've all already been chosen in a way so important that it doesn't matter all that much if they had a bad day at school when nobody put their names on a group project questionnaire. But for now, in an effort to avoid the therapists office for this issue one day, I consider it a sweet, sweet victory. Not one that I orchestrated, but one that I had the privilege to watch as it came to be.
I know I'm far from being a veteran teacher, and sometimes, in the thick of spring testing season, when I'd hear those wise reflections from seasoned colleagues about kids being more than test scores and the like, I'd take their word for it, but I didn't totally feel it yet. I was still being evaluated as if my kids were test scores, I was still sort of teaching as if my kids were test scores, so it was hard to separate what I knew in my heart to be true and what I saw in my own practice to be happening. I'm still getting there even now as I try to internalize it during each instructional day. But the other day, when everyone was picked, another piece of that truth hit my heart. When everyone gets picked, that's when the magic happens.
