Hannah Quirk is a senior this year at Ball State University. She is majoring in Elementary Education and Special Education. Please click on the link below to hear more about Hannah and her commitment to literacy education.
A Note from Hannah:
I love reading! I want to share my passion for reading with my students. This digital story is based on the poem, “I Opened a Book” written by Julia Donaldson. I plan on using this video as a trailer for reading in my classroom. Reading can take students anywhere in the world and have them get to know different perspectives.
Simply Being Here
Megan Markarian
First Year English Teacher
Ben David High school
Honestly, beginning one’s teaching career during a global pandemic isn’t ideal.
It’s not recommended—at least, not by me.
And here I and so many of my peers are, attempting to remember the lectures on Vygotskian theory or how to differentiate our teaching for individual students or even how to simply engage students in that first minute after the late bell rings.
But our kids are there, too. Our kids are in a place of limbo, caught between maintaining a grade point average and not shutting down into the glazed, Tik Tok consumed look we all know too well. I’ve been reassured by every colleague that this is not at all what it’s like—that these kids are usually so energetic and optimistic, that this is the most fights my administration has seen at this time of year. Ever.
I’ve been hearing an explanation for the fights, for the apathy, the general disdain for coming to school each day: “Well, they’ve been at home for the past two years. They haven’t had the typical socialization of a normal school year.” And to a certain extent, it’s true. Our students, our halls, and we have been devoid of the usual social interaction that comes with school. We have all experienced the loneliness of the quarantine season. And we have experienced the numbness of “zooming” our loved ones, sitting six feet away from our colleagues. But I think there’s more to it than that for our kids.
Because I’ve never met anyone angrier than a sixteen-year-old in 2021.
The fighting, the “back talking,” the indifference—they’re just done. And since anger, when it’s reduced to its basic instinct, is an expression of unmet needs, we must ask ourselves: what is it that our kids need? And how can we better meet those needs?
I decided to ask them.
And their answer may (or may not) shock you.
“Time.”
“Time for what?” They couldn’t tell, but my mouth was a gaping hole behind my mask.
Another student chimed in, one who usually refrains.
“Time to just…be here.”
This time, I made my shock known and cocked my head to one side.
“I really don’t know what you mean.” I was working hard to be professional.
“Sometimes, everything just feels like a lot.”
There.
Sometimes, everything just feels like a lot.
We know this feeling—come on, we really know this feeling. That feeling where the deadlines are closing in over your head and your parents are telling you that work called again with an extra shift to pick up and your significant other is asking you to homecoming and—
Our kids need time to just be, and to sit with each other and have conversations with nothing scrolling beneath their fingertips. Our kids are angry because they’re experiencing mass sensory overload. And the best way to get out of that kind of panic? To breathe, to sit, to just be.
We’ve all been through a lot. So, blaming the outcomes of trauma—acting out, excessive fighting, argumentativeness—on anything but the trauma itself is a disservice to our shared experience. As the first quarter draws to a head, I implore you to give your students room to simply be. Build in a few days where all you do is play charades (duly recommended) or discuss the nuances of sour gummy worms versus sour patch kids (sour patch kids have a different sourness, we concluded) or maybe all you do is listen to lo-fi radio and let the kids chat under the guise of a “workday.” Don’t sacrifice the content. But don’t teach at the expense of your students’ mental health either.
I guarantee you’ll benefit from simply being, too.