Confession Time

So I've slacked a little bit on the whole 'blog every day' thing.
We drove out to see my sweet Grandma for her 95th birthday and then we had Thanksgiving, and then I ate too much, and then I slept in, and then I chose to spend my writing time reorganizing my boards on Pintrest...you know, just procrastinating in general.
But here I am, as promised, and I today I have to write about last Sunday. A few posts ago I told you that my church decided to adopt the families of my classroom a community service for Thanksgiving. Last Sunday was the day church members met at my school, gathered all the donated items, then delivered them to my students' homes.
It was wonderful; as you could imagine.
I also forgot to take pictures. Not one. I'm a little upset about that.
But, again, it was fabulous.

Before the church folks delivered all the goodies, the pastor said a prayer in my classroom (Lord knows that room needs all the blessing folks want to dish out) and then he opened it up for questions. (Since only two of us from the church spoke Spanish in the group and all 18 families are Spanish-speakers, we were all a little curious about how the whole thing was going to play out.) One of the church members asked, "When we're speaking to the family, how do we let them know the bag of groceries is for the child in your class?"
This was an interesting question for me to hear. I understood why the person was asking, because typically there are two or three families living under one roof (with many children) and our Thanksgiving bags included one child-size sleeping bag (for the child in my class).
However, I was immediately reminded of the large gap between middle-class thinking and poverty thinking.
I'm realizing that the world my students live in, holds very few boundaries of 'yours and mine'. Its family and community, all the time. What's mine is yours and what's yours is mine. I have a feeling if you or I were in their shoes, we'd do the same. Can you imagine: A loved one beside you has nothing and you have something, do you keep it all to yourself or do you share? I believe in middle-class America we answer that question with, "Well, it depends on what we're talking about. Are we talking about the last ice cream sandwich in the freezer or...."
I think its hard for those of us in the middle-class America to even wrap our brains around 'having nothing'. However, what if I posed this situation/question, "You are a single mom, you only have one toothbrush (and you won't get paid/can't buy one for another two weeks), what would you do? Tell your child he can't brush his teeth for the rest of the month? Stop brushing your own teeth until the end of the month? Or do you share?"
This idea of community and sharing flows into the classroom. When your teacher gives you a math worksheet and you don't know how to fill in the blanks, what do you do? (Most adults in middle-class America would say, "Think about it - try your best." "Ask the teacher for help" etc.) But my students turn to their peers (i.e. they copy their neighbor's paper). Technically, this IS a problem solving strategy, but it's one that most teachers do not advocate. In the life of a child who's living in poverty, they see the situation differently. They see the situation as, "My friend understands this assignment, he has knowledge. I do not have this knowledge, so he should share his knowledge with me. Then when a time comes that I have knowledge and he doesn't, then it will be my turn to share, to lead my peers." In fact, keeping something to yourself (not sharing your knowledge/answers to an assignment), could be viewed as being selfish and not lifting up your community members; maybe even keeping them down.

So, of course, my students and their families do things like share toothbrushes, take a little less at dinner so everyone can eat, and squeeze together in a sleeping bag - so less people are cold as they sleep on the floor. They try to copy one another's papers and they often say the same answers as their peers during class discussions.

All this to say that when one person gives a grocery sack full of items to one child in my class, that one person is really uplifting an entire family (or in our case, with 18 families) a good portion of the community. One act of giving goes a long, long way.
Furthermore, when someone in my class is given a hand-me-down pair of boots or a sack of rice, they are not simply having their physical needs met. Instead, they are given a brain pass. Its a pass to stop feeling the stress of wondering if you will be cold as you walk to school or if there will be food at home. That precious brain space that has been occupied by mere survival stress in the past, can now be used for learning.

What a beautiful thing.