We had a ritual in the third grade classroom where I taught for many years. When the going began to get tough, when kids were fighting, when interpersonal understanding was breaking down, we played the “I Love You” game. One child was It, and went to the center of a circle formed by the others. The It child choose their victim from the circle, went over to that person, and pronounced their love in the most dramatic possible way, often on their knees with arms outstretched. They were required to look their chosen partner in the eye and say their name. For example, “Marisol, I Loooove you till the day I die!” The child on the receiving end of this adoration needed to return their admirer’s gaze, and straight-faced say, “DeOndre, I love you too, but I’m not allowed to smile.” Even on the most difficult days, we couldn’t keep the smiles at bay, and more often than not, the class erupted with laughter and delight at each pronouncement.
When the children learned the game at the beginning of each school year, these confessions of love were tentative and pro-forma, and rarely crossed lines of racial, ethnic, or gender identity. Many of my students were first or second generation immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Others were African American, Pacific Islander, Filipino, East Indian, and White. They were all considered “at-risk” due to the fact that they lived in an economically isolated community, which was seen by the outside world as rife with drugs, gang activity, and welfare dependency. The journey from these tentative beginnings, which more often than not included a refusal to play the game at all, to a place where children expressed their love freely and across differences, with joy, took hard work and a continual examination of the interconnectedness of us all, with each other, with the world. It required thoughtful orchestration, openness to the unexpected, and a tolerance for the uncomfortable. “I Love You” was more than just a game, but rather one of many ways that I worked to help my students build an ethos of caring that encompassed each other and extended beyond the classroom walls.
These days, I worry about joy in the classroom, and about whether teachers are able to do the important work necessary to connect children not only with each other, across difference, but also to larger world issues of caring, peace, and justice. In response to President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” legislation, as well as a variety of other state and national reform initiatives, many teachers in diverse, urban schools must, sometimes literally, stick to the script. Mandated literacy curriculum, such as the Open Court Reading program, is quickly becoming the norm in schools that serve poor students of color, and such programs can offer little leeway for individual teacher decision-making, as well as little time for any activity that is not perceived to directly affect the bottom line: test scores. Teachers are often required to be on a certain page, on a certain day, giving their students a steady and constant diet of scripted instruction in phonics, dictation, vocabulary development, and reading strategies.
Though, really, it is not the curriculum that is the problem. A good teacher will produce positive “results” regardless of any one curricular package. Rather, the problem lies in implementation policies directly tied to the need to increase test scores and satisfy NCLB requirements. Many teachers don’t completely hate Open Court. They are able to distinguish between components of the program that they feel to be beneficial for their students, and those that are a waste of time. They recognize that Open Court all-day-every-day provides their students with a narrowly-defined, reductionist curriculum. They know that the program fails to authentically incorporate the linguistic and cultural resources that kids bring with them to the classroom, and that there are precious few opportunities for children to write. So, these teachers modify, supplement, and enrich the program wherever they can.
However, an individual teacher’s power in this respect is often limited. There is simply not enough time in the school day to fulfill the curricular mandates and to continue to provide in-depth instruction in science, social studies, art, music, or any other area that cannot be quantified and tested. While there are hopefully light-hearted or joyful moments in the course of day-to-day life in an Open Court classroom, the ever-increasing pressures associated with mandated curricular implementation, with the barrage of standardized testing, with the endless accountability march, begins to whittle away at opportunities for the sustained, hard work that is necessary to build the kind of joy that comes from confronting difference and making deep connections with other human beings.
Why should we care about teachers having time to nurture joy and interconnectedness between and among students? These are not goals outlined in state content area standards, and they can’t be tested. Joy cannot be scripted into scope and sequence charts, and does not reside in a teacher’s manual. However, I believe that now, more than ever, we need to do the necessary work to develop human beings more open to diversity, difference, and yes, even conflict – qualities that we all need as we are simultaneously both local and global citizens.
Paolo Freire wrote, “Educators must become conscious individuals who live part of their dreams within their educational space.” My original classes of students are now several years out of high school: some in college, some having children, some working at a substandard wage, some enlisting in the armed forces, some, I imagine, sent to fight in Bush’s illegal war in Iraq. My dream for these students is that they might remember times when they reached beyond differences, beyond divisions, and were able to laugh and cry with each other. My wish is that these memories will inform the way that they interact with the world, and that the experiences they had in my educational space somehow helped to engender a respect for humanity and a tolerance for difference.
I urge to teachers continue to pursue the goals of nurturing joy, interconnection, and understanding in their diverse classrooms in spite of the relentless onslaught of scripted and quantified learning objectives that they face in the NCLB-driven system. The small efforts at learning the art of peace that go on in one classroom may seem insignificant in the face of the deep-seated divisions that our world must confront, but without such efforts there can be no hope for change.
Elisa Salasin is a literacy educator and a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project. She can be reached at elisasalasin@yahoo.com.
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