Community Circle
We have Core time with our homeroom students — mine are 8th graders — for 3o minutes at the end of each day. Core is our SSR time, but ELD students are in ELD during this time.
Once a month, however, we use this Core time to do a Community Circle (CC). We’re in our first year of implementation, and because my kids have shown genuine engagement in CC time, we hold it almost every Friday.
I normally pick one or two questions/topics for us to go around and share our answers/thoughts. Questions such as, “If you could be any animal, what would it be, and why?” and “What is your favorite food?” are light-hearted and fun.
But, if the topic gets any deeper than that, then I’m pretty much a wreck.
I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me.
I cried when talking with my students about my father, about my son, Gabriel, about the time when I ran away from home.
I get all choked up at workshops when I speak about a specific student.
Just last week, our school invited Kaiser Permanente to put on a play called, Someone Like Me, for our junior high students. It’s about adolescent bullying awareness, and one of the characters had written in her diary that she wanted to kill herself.
The thought of one of my students ever contemplating suicide makes my heart ache, my chest heavy, my head throbs. After the assembly, we were instructed to hold a CC with our students back in our classroom, but I was too emotional to even talk. Luckily, my colleague was there, and I’d asked her to facilitate the discussion.
I don’t want to know what my kids tell their parents when they get home. I wouldn’t be surprised if it went like this, “Jesus, Dad, Ms. Win cried again in our community circle today. And we were just talking about Jell-O.”
Oh, my God, that reminds me. One time — in the evening of our school’s Continuation Ceremony some years ago — a student pulled her father toward me to introduce us, “Dad, this is Ms. Win, she cried just the other day because she was afraid we girls would get pregnant.”
Seriously, I’d signed up to teach math. What is all this crying bullshit? I want to be a badass teacher, and badass teachers don’t cry, for Pete’s sake!
But, there’s still hope for me because one of my student’s moms tweeted this:
