You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
- Indira Gandhi
I was a young teacher, the new kid in the department, and so I got to teach the third-period sophomore English C class. Every day, I walked to that classroom with chest tightened, hands clenched and the sternest look I could muster. Period 3 meant facing a class of twenty-five insolent hulks, with a few girls mixed in. Everyone knew that “C” was a euphemism for bored, intransigent, lazy - or any combination thereof.
At 10:23 every morning, I sat terrified and sweating as the hulks lumbered into my class. Walt, short and stocky, had a police record. John had been kicked off the football team and now sat with his long legs raising and lowering the desk so that it made intermittent clunks that echoed on the wood floor. Nick sat near the outside wall, twisting the window-blind cord into knots. And Vin kept dropping his books during some of the rare moments of silence.
They talked to each other, called out answers at random and banged knuckles on the desks. When I asked them to write, they dropped pencils, crumpled their notes and sent paper airplanes flying. I set down rules. I pronounced consequences. I gave ultimatums. I told them in no uncertam terms that they had to change their behavior. The daily quizzes I gave to keep them quiet resulted in daily piles of papers for me to correct, but brought no noticeable improvement to their behavior.
One day, the police came to the door to question Walt about something, and that inspired John to clunk the desk even louder. Out of sheer desperation, I ordered John to the principal’s office. He looked at me in disbelief, saying, “Why me?” then proceeded to take a full five minutes to unwind his lanky frame from his desk and clomp to the front of the room.
When he reached the door, he turned to face the class and bowed while they all clapped.
I left school that day - and every day - frustrated and exhausted. By the time I finished grading all my disciplinary quizzes, I barely had the time and energy to walk my dog. Clearly, I was spending my personal resources and the taxpayers money on enforcing discipline, not on teaching English. What a waste! I finally got it: The only behavior I could change was my own. What if, instead of acting from fear, I acted from love? What if, instead of standing over them in all my imposing sixty-one inches, I worked side by side with them as a fellow learner? Clearly, the clenched fist wasn’t working. Why not open my hands and my heart?
The next morning, I convinced the principal’s secretary to give me enough small soft-covered notebooks for my Period 3 class. At 10:23, after giving one notebook to each of my students and one to myself, I announced that we were going to write as fast as we could for three minutes without stopping, and without any regard for spelling, punctuation or grammar. During a moment of stunned silence, I saw a number of sideways glances, raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders. I said, “Look. I’m working on my writing, too, and I’m going to write along with you. No questions asked. If you don’t know what to say, then just write, ‘I don’t know what to write’ for three minutes without stopping.” Nick punched John in the back while John’s eyes rolled in disbelief. “Let’s go,” I said. My heart was pounding as I began to write. After three minutes, I cautiously looked up and saw twenty-five hulks bent over small soft-covered notebooks, scribbling away.
We continued this drill every day at the beginning of the class period for the rest of the year. The change occurred slowly. The little notebooks became sources of information and instruction. We started by sharing words that jumped out at us from someone’s writing. Then it grew. It became cool to talk about writing, to expand vocabulary and even to spell correctly. We went to the notebooks to use our own sentences for revision, and we learned how to work in pairs and groups. When they wrote, I wrote. I didn’t diminish my subject-matter expertise, but I did let them know that I found writing hard work, too. And that was the truth. I read some of my work to them and told them where I was stuck. They offered suggestions and asked helpful questions. When Walt said, “You mean you don’t know all the answers?” I realized that this time they were laughing with me instead of at me.
Books stopped dropping on the floor, knuckles no longer banged on the desks, and John’s desk stayed miraculously in place. On a memorable Tuesday, I heard Walt call out to Vin, “Hey, what do you think of this description of how the inside of a police car smells? Pungent.”
Vin said, “Great word. I’ve never been inside a police car. What else did you smell and see in there?”
Gradually, Vin started to turn his love of sudden and unexpected sound and rhythm into poetry. Nick disengaged himself from the window cords and became the class vocabulary expert, keeping a thesaurus on his desk for general consultation. On the day John got applause for the piece he wrote on motorcycles instead of his walk to the principal’s office, I wanted to dance in the streets.
The notebooks became inspirations for longer pieces. After about six weeks of small daily steps that built on the three-minute writing, I got to class early one day to find Walt writing busily in his notebook. Head down, he said, “Last night I thought of more stuff that I wanted to say about that day in the police car.” When he looked up at me for an instant, I saw tears in his eyes. I touched his shoulder gently and said, “Let me know if you want to share any of this with me.” He looked up once again, this time with a tearful smile, and we began to share our stories.
From that point on, we all unclenched our fists - and our hearts. The threats and ultimatums were gone. I went home energized instead of depleted, and the taxpayers were finally getting what they paid for. Caring and mutual respect, mixed with a bit of humor, worked every time. It was so simple once I got it. The hulks were really angels at heart.
- Dee Montalbano