There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty to be happy. By being happy we see anonymous benefits upon the world.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
I always kept a bottle of Joy liquid dishwashing deter-gent on my classroom sink. If my students were not having a peaceful day, they were to go wash their hands with the soap to get a little more “joy” in their lives. The students believed that if they didn’t have joy in their lives, they wouldn’t have any peace. If they lost their peace, then they would lose their joy.
I had been working with an inner-city first-grade class, and their behavior was very challenging. Every time I visited the classroom, we discussed how we could keep our peace and not fight and hit everyone. I left a bottle of Joy in their classroom on one of my visits, hoping it would help remind the students to keep joy in their lives. I visited the classroom one last time before school was out for the summer. When I entered the room, there seemed to be a calmer feeling among the students. The teacher had been spending more time doing activities where the students worked on building relationships with each other. The time spent was paying off. The classroom actually felt peaceful.
I praised the class for their efforts, and as I left, I noticed the bottle of Joy was gone from the sink. I was thinking it must have taken a lot of Joy to make their classroom peaceful. As I was walking down the hall, a little boy ran after me, yelling for me to wait. I turned and saw Jerrome, one of the most challenging children in the class, following me.
“Wait, wait. I want you to take this,” he yelled. I looked down, and in his hands was the bottle of Joy wrapped in rough brown paper towels and secured with a copious amount of tape. Scrawled on the top of the package was “President Bush.”
“I want you to mail this to the president. Maybe this will help the people fighting find their peace.”
Tears were in my eyes as I left the school with the special package in my hand. I sent a note to Jerrome to thank him for his kindness, only to have it returned to me with a note that said: “Jerrome has moved. This will be the seventh time he moved this school year, and we do not have a forwarding address.”
I just hope that Jerrome can find the peace in his own life that he was so eager for others to have.
- Barbara Pedersen