This afternoon I was sitting in the Starbucks conference room (who knew there was such a thing) at Mariposa and Bryant, taking part in my professional book group. We are reading the book How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. It is a book about communication, about different "languages" or models of discourse that can be found in everyday interactions between people. Sounds boring, maybe, but the content is very key to success in my line of work and also the people in the group are awesome, so it's super fun.
Partway through we were sharing quotes from the book with one another. The person whose turn it was to share a quote would tell us all the page number and approximate location on the page (i.e., "second full paragraph, last few sentences, start where it is 'And in this way...' or whatever). Then we would all find it, and read along in our minds as that person read aloud. Once, though, the woman sitting next to me was lost and could not find the quote on the page that had been announced. "Wait, what? Where is it?" she asked as the person began to read aloud their selection from the text. I leaned over and pointed in her book to the spot where the person had begun to read. "Great, thanks!" she murmured, relieved, as she began to follow along on her page.
As the discussion unfolded I was only half paying attention because the act of showing her where we were reading had taken me back in time to my last classroom, that huge room with a wall of windows tucked upstairs in the ark-inspired building on Brotherhood Way. I taught there for five years, in my little home-away-from-home, and in our class we spent far more time on building community and reinforcing positive social behavior than on parts of speech or memorizing math facts. Just like Kegan and Lahey describe there being languages of interactions between adults, there are certainly languages of interactions between kids too and one joyful thing for me was to help every kid who came into our class become a fluent speaker of the language that helps us get along with one another.
This idea of discourse with children is one of the reasons I first started blogging, almost six years ago now. It was really all Matt's idea in the beginning, he was the one who was most insistent that the stories I told around the big redwood brunch table in his kitchen actually had a far wider audience. Like me, Matt is a bit of a whore for languages and through conversations with him I came to understand that not all adults speak Kid in the way that I do. "How did you know what to say to them, how could you tell what they were talking about?" he would marvel. A bit of natural affinity, perhaps, but a WHOLE lot of practice.
One thing that was always part of the language of my own classroom was the way that you help your neighbor when they get lost during read-aloud time. If we are all looking on our own copies of a shared text (like Friday afternoon during Social Studies, for example, when we would read our weekly newsmagazine Time for Kids) and someone gets lost, you should help them find their place. However, you should not do what comes naturally--pointing at your own page--because then they have to look at your page, find the word you're pointing at, look back at their own page, find the word there, and by then we're on to the next sentence and things have gotten worse instead of better. Instead, when someone is lost during read-aloud you should point on their own page since that is where they are reading anyway. Then they can easily get back on track and you can return to reading your personal text. Don't get me wrong, this took a lot of practice. Kids are developmentally very self-centered. So it was not easy to get them in the habit of leaving their inner world to point at someone else's page. But with time they got it and soon it was second nature.
So simple, right? But such a revolutionary idea: helping each other the way the other person needs help, not the way WE think they need help. As I sat in the Starbucks conference room, pointing to the spot in Jen's book where she should start reading, I smiled to myself and thought back to all the kids out there in the world who point to other people's books and help them get back on track. It is nice to know that the long hours and underwhelming pay and emotional fatigue that come with this job are balanced by the good karma of hundreds of kids becoming adults who have learned the value of helping someone else the way that person needs to be helped.
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