said, ‘You know, Sam, I’d love to try this experiment and it’s totally within your rights to say no, but
I think it would be awesome to try it.’ Sam was hesitant, but he agreed. I described the process that
had been told to me: how we stop, make a circle, and, rather than harping on the thing that was
wrong, we remind ourselves and the person why we love them, what makes them a valuable
member of the community and how their behavior right now is making it hard for us to function as a
community.
So I put him in the middle, literally, on this rug. We all sat around and I said, ‘you’re allowed to pass
but I’d really like you to think about it before you pass and then I’ll come back to you later and give
you another chance to share’. Oh my God, it is honestly going to go down in my memory as one of
the best experiences I’ve ever had as a teacher. They said some things you might expect a 2nd
grader to say like, ‘you’re a good friend’, ‘you’re good at basketball’, but then they just blew my
mind. One of my students is very self-absorbed, and I never would have imagined that she had
any degree of awareness of those around her. She said, ‘I love how when you come into the
classroom in the morning, you always say good morning and you have this big smile on your face
and it looks like you’re having a great time all the time. I don’t always feel that way, and when I look
at you I feel better.’ And she’s not even friends with him! And then it just got better. They kept
saying things like, ‘you’re an awesome apologizer’, and ‘when you apologize, I’m not mad
anymore.’ I literally teared up. And then they’re looking at
me
like, ‘what’s wrong?’ And I’m like,
‘absolutely nothing’. It’s just so beautiful. The one little girl who had chosen to pass was one of my
strongest students so I thought, ‘Hmm, I wonder if she just doesn’t have it in her, emotionally, to go
there?’ Still, at the end I came back to her and asked if she was ready to take her turn and she
said, ‘Well, I don’t want to hurt his feelings’. And I thought, ‘Hmm, okay, maybe we should pass’
and then she said, ‘But I think I know how I want to say it.’ OK, so at this point he’s showered with
love and I thought, okay, one little comment won’t kill him. And he’s beaming. She said, ‘Well, last
year I think school was really hard for you and you struggled a lot and I remember thinking that I
was worried that you weren’t going to make it. And then this year you’ve just worked so hard and
you had these really great breakthroughs and you’re just so smart and I didn’t know that about you
last year and now I know that’. And, honestly, that was the home run because everyone else had
said things that he already kind of believed or knew about himself but she was saying something
that I think he actually didn’t know about himself. And she was articulate enough to really name it.
It was really lovely, so lovely. The whole conversation took about 35 minutes, but I’m pretty sure
the rest of my academic day would have been lost otherwise. When we were done I said, ‘now we
need to get to work’ and we did. It was as if the clouds cleared and there was a very different vibe
in the room. It was pretty powerful and became another time in this program where I thought, ‘I
don’t know what to say about this’, because in the fifteen years that I’ve taught I’ve never had that
kind of experience . . . where I could trust that my kids could be so loving with one another, you
know?’”
In teaching kindness and compassion, it often comes down to trust. The pedagogy and practices
are not intended to teach something new. Instead, they are a way of uncovering, revealing and
reconnecting with what is already there. So often, when that connection becomes broken, it is hard
to trust our own hearts, or one another. It is even hard for teachers to trust their young students, as
Linda so poignantly articulated. It takes courage and an open mind to challenge habitual ways of
responding as both Mary and Linda were able to do. Through the formal practices of kindness and
compassion, Mary short-circuited her habitual mental pattern of blame and anger, and uncovered
the care and compassion that were always there. This allowed her to access creative ways of
reaching her most difficult students. Linda experimented with her softer and more tender side, and
challenged her belief that toughness and punishment are the most effective ways to elicit behavior
change.
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