The Classroom and Community

I was thinking today about first year teachers frustrations with discipline and management. Many choose sarcasm, threats and fear to achieve unity; that works for a time but it kills community and in the end the students hate you. It also subverts any productive learning that can and should take place in a classroom. So here's my thought- this is initial and I have done no research so bear with me- the classroom should be a community. It should run like, feel like and look like a community. Everyone has a part to contribute and every voice counts. The voices of my ninth graders are stifled many times by bureaucracy and arrogance. For them to be heard and understood is a blessing they long for and rarely receive. Over the next month I will continue with this and come up with a few experiments in my classroom at community building.

The poem below reminds me every day that sometimes we need to be reminded of our loveliness, and I think that the classroom is a great place to start.....(more to come....


Saint Francis and the Sow
by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.