And now for something a little different from the substitute teaching lens

 I subbed for my daughter yesterday. I wasn’t sure how I’d cope as I am still somewhat jet lagged but she has a very well behaved fifth grade class: they’re respectful, good humored (most of the time) and willing to learn (most of the time). She warned me the night before that there had been some “issues” this week—kids fighting on the playground, some backtalk in class from a boy who’s normally a very hard worker.

With that in mind, I started off my day in the classroom addressing this up front. “I hear it’s been a tough week,” I said and then waited for a response. Some shifting in the chair, some rolling of the eyes, a couple of “Yeah, it really has” emanated from the kiddos. I then sat on the corner of my desk and talked about how I remembered being their age, the emotions, how things seem so very important, so very “raw” in the moment. I shared with them how my own teachers reacted to misbehaviors, after-school detention (Wow, Mrs A, AFTER school? They could DO that?) But then I also shared my experience when I was in my senior year of high school and my mother died suddenly right at the beginning. How my teacher sat me down and addressed the pain, the shock, promised me that I WOULD make it through and that she would be there to help me. And she was. It was very much “tough love”—she gave me a little bit more slack but she also insisted I kept my grades up, that I came to school in the regulation uniform, and so on. She kept me on track believing that if outwardly I seemed to be doing okay, then inwardly I'd be okay too. Was it the way I would handle it nowadays? No, it was a short-term solution, get someone through, but it didn't address the deep pain, didn't really teach me healthy coping mechanisms.

This feeling was actually made clearer in the class yesterday when I said that when I was about their age there was no place for emotional counseling in our schools. Academic counseling, yes, but no, not emotional. One of the students spontaneously exclaimed, “Wow, Mrs A! No counseling in school? I wouldn’t survive without counseling!” This, from a 10 year old! She's recognized she can't go it alone and she knows that reaching out to the kind and understanding counselor they have at their school helps her tremendously. In fact, they all agreed they are lucky that not only do they have a counselor at school they can go to but that also their teacher--my daughter (blush)--was someone who was very approachable, loving and kind.

There's a place for "Let's just get through this hour, this test, this day" but we also need to follow up with a continual checking in "How did that feel for you? What's still bothering you? What can you do about it? What kind of help do you need...." And we still do need that, no matter what age we are. We don't just shut down in our senior years, although it seemed in generations past that IS what happened. And yet, we have stories from people who've thrived into their 80s, 90s, even 100s, that tell us that shutting down isn't the way to go. Opening up is; being open to experiences that make you happy, that bring other positive, loving and helpful people into your orbit. Finding out that sometimes what was right for you when you were young is still right--eat your vegetables, brush your teeth, get a good night's sleep--and sometimes it's not. The messages we heard that were critical without being loving, the times we felt that we were unworthy, that our dreams didn't count . . . those need to be thrown out along with don't go out with wet hair, you'll catch pneumonia or dancing too closely with a boy will make you pregnant [laughing--I kid you not, that's what our nuns told us in junior high!]