Bringing Joy Back into the Classroom by Danny Brassell

Author:Danny Brassell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shell Education

“I’m Nobody! Who Are You?”

By Emily Dickinson (1978)

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

Reading Dickinson, one gets the feeling she had a pretty low opinion of herself. Did you know that Emily Dickinson never shared her poetry while she was alive? It’s true: they found all of her poems in her attic after her death. This woman had no idea how much joy she would give the world with her poetry. Tell your students that all of them were put on Earth to share their poetry.

While you may be hard-pressed to find sufficient evidence about the need for belonging, this is a common theme in novels, autobiographies, plays, and especially poetry. By encouraging students to write about their experiences and share them with their classmates, you can gain valuable insights into what your students feel. This helps you serve your students better.

Tend Your Flock

A football coach once told his players that they had a choice to be one of two things: a bag of marbles or a bag of grapes. When a confused player asked him what he meant, the coach elaborated. “A bag of marbles consists of individual units that do not affect one another unless colliding,” he said. “At any moment, any member of this team can choose to skip a practice or weight-training session, since no one really cares whether there are 55 or 56 marbles in a bag.” Then the coach looked at his players and asked them if they wanted to be a bag of grapes. “The juices begin to mingle, and there is no way to extricate yourselves if you tried,” the coach said. “Each is part of all, and each individually contributes to the overall fragrance.”

One of the reasons NBA basketball coach Phil Jackson was so successful is because he ensures that his twelfth man on the bench feels just as important as Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan to the success of his team. Your students need to believe that they are part of your herd, your flock, your posse—whatever you want to call yourselves.

Too many people underplay the deep importance of belonging. Make your kids feel like they are supposed to be there, and encourage them to learn the importance of supporting one another. This is just as important, if not more important, in middle and high school as it is in elementary school.

There’s a story about a high school basketball player who lost his mother to cancer earlier in the day but decided to play in his team’s game that night. He showed up in the second quarter and—since his coach had left him off the roster, thinking he would not play—his team was assessed a mandatory technical foul. When the opposing team took the two free throws, they intentionally missed both, out of empathy for the opposing player’s tragic loss. There are

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