Silence

This week was the first week of school with kids.  As such, I came home every night, wondering how it was possible to be as exhausted as I was, and I woke up every morning with dark bags still hanging beneath my eyes.  I have spent 10-11 hours at school pretty much every day, and while I recognize that there are teachers and administrators who spend even more time at school or working at home each day, I still don't like it.  I don't like it because I think it's bullshit to spend almost half of my waking hours on work.  And I don't like it because this week, a significant chunk of that time was spent on tasks that were mentally arduous only in the sense that it was hard to keep my grey matter from dripping out of my ears.  Paperwork.  It is the bane of my existence.  I spent more than four hours this week accepting and sorting and submitting paperwork.  Probably another four just labeling things.  There's got to be a better way.

On the bright side, I felt less stressed Friday than I did the first day.  Monday, man, that was a different story.  I thought I was going to have a mini breakdown.  "Near tears" is probably the best way to put it, but maybe "about to tear my hair out" is better.  Between internet connectivity issues, slow-working students, schedule confusion, and the interruptions that define classroom life, I had had it.

But then, sometime during that first day and into the evening when I saw my therapist and into the next morning when I walked back into that school building, I began to feel better.  And for that, I have two things to thank:

Patience and Silence.

Somehow, after seven full years of teaching, it has finally occurred to me to just wait for silence.  And somehow, after seven full years of trying everything under the sun to get kids to stop talking while I'm talking, my classroom is quieter than it has ever been.  And it's not quiet because the kids are scared.  It's quiet because I've trained them that I will wait until they stop and listen.

I want to cry for the joy of it all.

The idea came from a blog post some teacher put up on facebook before the year began.  I read it, dismissed all the ideas I'd already tried and the ones that just don't fit my personality, and honed in on this one in particular.  I took a pink post-it from my supplies, grabbed a sharpie, and wrote

USE SILENCE

on it, before posting it on my computer dock.  Because it seems to me that my classroom--like so much of the world--is filled with unnecessary chatter.

I say this knowing that I am, perhaps, the greatest perpetrator of all.

Every morning, around 9am, I walk my students down to the bathroom.  As per school rules, and general human consideration, I ask them to be silent in the hallway and stairwell, so as not to disturb the other classes going on in the area.  However, it wasn't until last year that I realized that I was doing a lot of talking in the hallway and stairwell myself during these trips.  I would ask someone to do this, remind someone of that, make a joke to one student (and then shush them when they tried to respond in kind), warn another to be quiet, and general blah-blah-blah my way down to the bathroom and back up.  No wonder they had such a hard time keeping sound in.  I was telling them how important it was to zip it, and my flap was wide open!  So I stopped.  I only spoke in my classroom to remind them of expectations and then again in the bathroom area to request a quiet, straight line before leaving.  I parsed my words.  I used hand signals as much as possible.  And they were quiet.

Well, let's be real, they're children.  But they were pretty close.

This year, I've coupled the silence with firm consequences.  You talk, you move to the end of the line.  I was pretty sure I was going to have a couple of boys crying on their first day with me, but nothing says "I expect you to follow the rules" like cracking down when you don't.

Warnings are for people who don't already know the rules.  If I've told you the rules, consider that your warning.

Part of me is very uncomfortable with the silence.  My classroom in years past has always been a place where sound reigns.  Children speak and move and laugh, and the sound of silence was something saved for moments when the classroom was empty.  But it was hectic and rushed, and as the year went on, I would always find myself getting shorter and shorter with them for talking over me and being too loud.  For doing something I never really trained them not to do.

In my mind, this silence is a gift to my students.  To the ones who love noise, and to the ones who can't stand it.  It is small moments of meditation throughout the day.  It is tiny specks of time in which their ears can clear, and their mind can reset.

The pastor at my church thinks about silence in much the same way.  While he is all for socializing and building community and getting mass done as quickly as possible (our songs tend to be pretty peppy just based on speed alone), he is really conscious about building in short spurts of silence throughout the liturgy.  Last time I cantored (sang) at my church, the choir director told me to count to thirty before getting up after each reading.  At first, the silence felt awkward (Do the people in the congregation think I forgot that it's my turn?), but I've come to love it.  A little space for introspection.  A little space for savoring.

In choosing silence as this year's pedagogical theme, I hope to find myself more relaxed at the end of each day.  I hope to find my students less anxious and rushing from place to place.  I hope to find that things in my classroom actually happen faster because we're taking these mini-brain-breaks every so often, seemingly without noticing.

So far, my blood pressure has stayed pretty low, despite the fact that we lost a week and a half of school, that spotty internet has thwarted many of my classroom activities, and that I've spent way too much time working since the academic year began.

Now if I could just get myself to start meditating in the evenings, I might be able to get a little zen in my home life, too.