Something unusual happened in one of my Spanish classes last Friday. This is a third-year Spanish class, one designed for heritage speakers - those kids whose parents speak Spanish at home, but who mostly grew up in the United States and thus have all their literacy training in English. They know Spanish vocabulary and can have a conversation in Spanish, but they haven't had much Language Arts training in Spanish.
Since day one of this school year, this class just hasn't clicked. An enthusiastic and productive atmosphere has been a struggle. They come in and just sit in their seats; they seem tired and listless most of the time; if I ask them to discuss a concept with a partner, they resist, not daring to open up and share any analyses or insights; some of them won't even discuss simple opinions, such as favorite foods. There are a few very chatty sophomore girls, and a few senior boys who are the complete opposite. These boys like to work (or sometimes, not work) on their own, and come with stoic faces, defensive or indifferent body language, and a silence that works as a kind of opposite downside to the girls' shrill sophomore laughter and constant gossip. (It's not that the males don't gossip -- if you get them going, they gossip quite a lot. But again, that's IF you get them going.)
The interesting thing is that I had many of these students last year, and last year the class atmosphere was positive. It felt like a close-knit group. I don't know if it's that more of them have senioritis this year, or if adding thirteen new kids to what was a class of twenty has changed the chemistry, or if the combination of personalities simply isn't working out. Based on their reactions to me and the way they talk to me, I am fairly certain that I have a good relationship with most of them, but they don't seem comfortable with each other. Some of them don't get along outside the classroom, but being what they call a "snitch" is the worst insult possible for many of them, so even if they have good reason to tell an adult, most of them won't.
All that to say... the classroom got so dull at one point that I realized these kids were going to need a lot more icebreaker and energizer activities: things to help them get to know each other, to trust each other more, at least within the classroom, and things to increase their energy levels at the start of class time. Otherwise, every class period was going to feel like an hour and thirty-five minutes of book work, even when it wasn't.
I decided to do an icebreaker on Friday: a game where you write a description of someone and others have to guess, and then you have to describe that person in one word while others guess, and then do an action to represent that person while others guess. High school kids like pretty much anything that revolves around them, especially if there's a social element, so I thought they would enjoy it. I had each kid write his or her name on a 3x5 card, and then I collected and redistributed them and told them that they needed to write a one-sentence description of that person ("and be nice, or I'm not going to read yours," I added).
So they did, and I gathered the cards once again, and looked through the descriptions. There were a few that included distinguishing features of their classmates, but for the most part, the descriptions were way too general: "This person is very nice and intelligent." "This person is athletic." "You're really nice and I like your long dark hair [not exactly an outstanding feature in a room with twenty Hispanic girls]." One person just wrote "He's a cutie," about one of the senior boys.
After I read a few to myself, I teased my students a bit: "Maybe we need to have a class on writing descriptions? These are really general." I said. "Let's just try it and see how it goes."
I actually thought it might be a good, teachable moment. I wanted them to see how little information a vague description actually gives, so I was going to read four or five and have them rewrite them after seeing how difficult they were to guess.
But then, something curious happened. As I read these vague descriptions, I started to see faces light up.
"This person is very intelligent," I read from the card. All the the kids started looking around the room and naming off the high achievers in the room. Even if the card wasn't describing them, those kids looked pleased that someone guessed their name, that someone thought they were intelligent. And when they landed on the actual object of the description - "Yep, it's L.," I would answer - that student would blush. "Aw, thanks guys," some of them started saying.
Again, the compliments varied, though some only slightly: "Very pretty and very kind"; "You're a really good friend;" even one that said, "You're super smart and your eyebrows are on point." (All of it was in Spanish, of course.) As I read these compliments out loud, more and more kids were smiling, and the body language relaxed: kids were sitting up straighter and uncrossing their arms, looking at each other and responding to each other rather than staring into space or looking at me. I thought it might be a good idea to give every single kid a compliment, but I didn't want it to get old, so I asked the kids if they were bored and we should move on, or if we should read through all them. "Let's read all of them!" was unanimous.
I know that some of the kids may have wanted to go through all the compliments simply to avoid any actual work or mental effort. But based on the changed atmosphere in the room, I think there was more going on. In every class, you have kids who come from homes or situations where they may not have had anything positive said to them that day - maybe even that week. Even the kids who come from highly supportive and encouraging families have to deal with the shallow, hyper-critical, self-centered world of high school students who usually don't give compliments except to close friends. Even between friends, put-downs are considered a form of humor and entitled complaining is a common way to bond. For most people, high school is rough, or at least has many rough days. And it felt like magic to see the kids light up as their classmates encouraged them and pointed out the positive.
So, I read all of them. And in the space of ten minutes, every single kid in my classroom got an affirmation from a classmate. The kids, though their descriptive skills were lacking (and they later realized they had kind of missed the point when they had trouble guessing someone), wrote very kind and encouraging words, and I was pleased that they had all taken seriously my charge to not be hurtful toward anyone.
Moments like these are not, I would say, the norm of teaching, at least on a daily basis. But what happened on Friday was one of those magic moments that makes teaching the best job.
