David, a slight fourth grader, smaller than the rest of his peers, was a student who learned kinesthetically and through experience which provided for great entertainment at times in my inner city Chicago classroom. David had dark brown skin which caused the whites of his eyes and his beautiful white teeth to pop. His brown eyes were accentuated by his incredibly long, curly eyelashes and he would talk with his lips protruding forward and slightly pouting. And when he made a discovery, his whole face would explode with expression with his body upright, completely engaged - rarely seated, as sitting would have been too limiting in his body’s need to express.
In our fourth grade classroom, I would daily read aloud to the children after their lunch and P.E. class. This gave the students an opportunity to simmer down after being so active during our break. There was a ritual during this read-aloud time where the students would apply hand lotion to their arms, legs and face after P.E. I am still not certain as to the meaning behind the ritual, but as long as it didn’t interfere with read aloud and it calmed the children down, I was fine with it. The girls typically provided the Vaseline Intensive Care hand lotion which they would generously share with the rest of the class.
One day, while I was reading aloud Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, I looked up to discover David fully covered in lotion to the point where we could no longer see the darkness of his skin. He was a skinnier version of the Pilsbury Dough Boy with the addition of what looked like whipped cream.
David was standing, as usual, because he could only experience things fully while standing with his arms stiffly stretched out in front of him. When he noticed my eyes on him, he exclaimed with panic, “I can’t rub it all in! I took too much!”
David acted as if this was going to be a permanent condition for life! He had a look of shock on his face as his lips were drooping. He continuously rubbed his face and arms trying with no success to get the lotion to absorb into his skin.
I calmly, while holding back laughter, said, “David, it is going to be ok. It will come off!” By the look on David’s face, he wasn’t so sure.
The class obviously loved the free entertainment that David was providing and just started laughing. It was hard not to! So I calmed the class down, put my arm around David’s shoulders to provide some reassurance that everything was going to be ok, and escorted him and his buddy, Gregory, for moral support, across the hall to the boy’s bathroom. Projecting my voice from the hallway into the bathroom, trying my hardest not to disturb other classes, I gave the boys instructions on how to use the soap and water to wash off all the extra hand lotion and use a paper towel as a sponge to scrub it off.
So there I stood in the middle of the hallway, guiding David and Gregory from outside the bathroom entrance, while simultaneously keeping an eye on my classroom to make sure the rest of the group was following my instructions to silently read, while I took care of David’s predicament. Running from my classroom to the bathroom back and forth, who know how many times, was some serious interval training for my upcoming marathon that October. I must have looked ridiculous to the other teachers who were, at this point, peering through their classroom door windows because I was creating so much commotion in the hallway.
Thankfully, David was able to pull through his over-lotioned condition, and although he learned his lesson about the necessary amount of lotion for his petite frame, he was not out of the woods from opportunities to experientially and kinesthetically learn the lessons of life and I wasn’t out of the woods either of experiencing the natural consequences with him, side by side…..
So yet again the morning bell rang for another day in my fourth grade classroom at Washington Irving Elementary, when little Adan, who was actually even smaller than David, ran up to me and gasped breathlessly, as if he had just run up a flight of stairs.
“Miss Sheldon, David brought an ice cream sandwich for lunch today! He told everyone in the class line this morning. Miss Sheldon, it is going to be melted by lunch! We need to tell him!”
Here we go again, I thought to myself - another experiential learning opportunity for David.
I bent down and looked Adan right in his sweet, concerned eyes, and reassuringly said, “It's ok, Adan. I got this!”
I turned around grabbed my clipboard and started checking the children’s assignments. I knew full well that I would be foregoing my lunch and probably my preparation period to walk through the natural consequences from David stashing an ice cream sandwich in his backpack for lunch.
So the 10:30am lunch bell rang, and the children dashed to their designated hooks on the wall with their coats and backpacks. The children were all rummaging through their backpacks to locate their lunches, when all of sudden, we heard, “OHHHH, NOOO!”
David’s eyes were as large as golfballs and his jaw was gaping as he observed melted ice cream dripping from the bottom of his backpack. He had the same look of shock on his face as he did the day he overdosed on hand lotion, as if his backpack would be destroyed for life.
So I approached David and asked innocently, as if I didn't know anything, “What happened?”
“I brought an ice cream sandwich for lunch today, but it looks like it melted! And my backpack!”
So again, I put my arm around David’s shoulders and reassured him that we could clean it up together. I ushered the rest of the students to lunch, but asked Adan this time to stay behind for moral support. So together we spent the entire lunch period cleaning out David’s backpack in the bathroom, wiping down everything that was unable to evade the melting ice cream. Thankfully, we were able to get it all clean by the end of lunch.
I then turned to David and asked, “David, will you be bringing ice cream to school again for lunch?”
Shaking his head vigorously, David, with his eyes downcast and his lips pouting, replied , “Uh-uh!”
I then walked the boys down to the cafeteria where I explained the situation to the staff who were able to provide David with something for lunch. While David and Adan were eating, I headed to the gym to explain to Mr. Dumford that my two boys wouldn’t be at gym today. Then I swung by the office to check my mailbox and messages, and I headed back up the stairs to the second floor, when I heard my students’ voices rounding the corner from the gym.
Darn it! I missed my lunch and preparation period and now it was time to embark on the second half of the day with these little rascal and no real break. But in that moment, I knew that the lesson that David learned that day was far greater than any little break that I needed. I had so much compassion for David. Being a foster child who had been moved from home to home, David was rarely given the time to be trained in the way he should go and he was often misunderstood for his energy and impulsivity. He was typically punished for his impulsivity rather than lovingly walked through the natural consequences of his actions. He needed my attention that day!
From my year with David, I learned that as a teacher and now a mother, but even as a friend and wife, I need to allow others to have the dignity of their own journey, their own choices and the consequences of their choices, whether positive or negative. At times, those consequences can also impact me, as they had with David, as I straddled between the hallway and the school bathroom during the lotion overdose episode, and as I missed my preparation and lunch period for the ice cream meltdown. However, at the end of the day, the power of the lesson was/is far greater than any of the consequences that impacted me from being a bystander. And typically the lesson hits home and people are transformed from experiencing the consequences of their actions and being love through them rather than punished or shamed.
David provided me with plenty of opportunities to learn how to allow him the dignity of his own journey during that year of fourth grade. He stretched my character and tested my patience, but I learned over time how to get out of the way and give him the chance to learn the lessons himself rather than from a lecture. And I am thrilled to share that David never overdosed on lotion again and ice cream was never the main entree for lunch, or at least not in my classroom.
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