It would have been like any other Monday of the school year. The students would have come in, answered the daily attendance question, done 10 minutes of independent reading, attended to the lesson of the day, and been on their way to their next class.
But on this particular Monday, the server was unexpectedly down. This meant that no one had access to the internet, so no one could access our learning management system where we did the bulk of our classwork. Even the copier used the internet, so I couldn’t even pivot to paper. We teachers are used to thinking on the fly and making snap decisions, but I have to admit that this setback left me struggling with how to proceed for the day.
While my first-period students read their books, I scrambled to come up with ways to meaningfully continue with the work we had been doing in my other classes that did not require the use of technology. When I couldn’t come up with anything else, I told my seniors to simply get out a piece of notebook paper, start with the phrase “Today, I feel…” and fill the page. There were some grumblings for sure, but soon all that could be heard was the scratching of pencils on paper.
When I sat down at the end of the day to read what my students had written, I was moved to tears. I had not expected the worries, fears, frustrations, and heartache that poured out of those pages. This was a pleasant group of students. They participated in class, they smiled and laughed during activities, yet there was a lot of heaviness weighing on their shoulders that I hadn’t realized. They were carrying relationship problems, family troubles, low self-esteem, and uncertainty about the future.
Kids have always had these things on their plates, but in this post-pandemic world, a lot of kids are holding a lot of trauma and anxiety. While as teachers we can’t solve all of these problems for our students, we do have the power to give students ways in which to manage their hardships and challenges. With this in mind, I thought about the end-of-unit project that I had planned to start on that day before the server went down. I thought about the skills I would be assessing and realized that I could hit those in our next unit. Instead, in light of how the students responded to the writing assignment, I decided to scrap the assignment entirely.
It just didn’t feel right to power through with the project, given what my students had revealed to me and with the added stress of our technology issues. It also didn’t feel right to leave all of those feelings unacknowledged. I imagined how I might feel if I opened up and bared my soul to someone and their response was “Okay, but let’s get back to interpreting the symbolism in this text.” I wanted to hold space for all of those feelings and honor the vulnerability of my students. I started by responding to each of my students’ reflections with a personal note of encouragement or solidarity.
The next day the server was still down, but it didn’t matter, because I had already decided to surprise my students with a party to celebrate everyone in the class’s birthday. The writing assignment had given my students the quiet reflection time that they had needed, but now I wanted to center joy. Maya Angelou said, “We need Joy as we need air. We need Love as we need water. We need each other as we need the earth we share.” Too often we forget about the need for joy in education, but this should always be a goal we strive for in our classrooms.
Many years ago, when I was doing my student teaching, my supervisor would review a lesson with me and, after I explained all the objectives and learning outcomes I was hoping for, follow up by saying, “Great! But how do you want the student to feel?” I was startled by this question the first time she asked it, because in my own experience of school, it didn’t seem like something teachers actually considered.
What I wanted my students to feel at this moment was joy. I had settled on a birthday party because everyone has a birthday that we could celebrate, and students in high school so rarely have their birthdays celebrated. This was a pocket of joy that I could tap into. We had cupcakes, blew bubbles, had a balloon toss, and played some class games. Would this solve all of my students’ problems? Definitely not. But if it created a small bright spot in their day, then taking the time to engage in this bit of levity and community building was worth it.
While this all stemmed from the server going down, I would encourage you not to wait until tragedy strikes to check in with your students. Make it a regular and intentional practice to check in with them. I have recently begun to send out a quarterly check-in to my students via Google Forms to gauge how they are feeling and engaging with the content of the course. To avoid this from becoming just another rote activity that students dread completing, I switch up the questions each quarter and make sure to respond to students afterward in some way—whether through a reading conference, a note, or a comment or acknowledgment in class—to show them that I have seen their responses and will address their problems and concerns if needed.
At the end of the school year as graduation approached, students were reminiscing about the year when Alayna said, “Remember when you threw us all a birthday party?”
Another student replied, “Yeah, I can’t believe you did that!”
Moments of joy in the classroom are too far and between. Every day doesn’t need to be a party, but I need to watch, listen, and learn to find ways to center joy in the classroom.
