5 days of generosity

I’m taking a class on the six paramitas (perfections). They are: generosity, morality, tolerance, energy, meditation, and wisdom. I can’t possibly represent what the teachers are teaching us in class- I can only share what I remember and what stands out for me each week. So, please take my discussions of the paramitas with a grain of salt and an awareness that this information is being filtered/ altered through my interpretation, recollection, and interest each week.

Okay, so, it turns out that the paramitas are kind of on a continuum;  a continuum of, well, difficulty in terms of putting in to practice. Generosity is kind of like a starter paramita and wisdom is a sort of culmination of all the others; like, if you’re able to act with wisdom, you’re putting into practice all the paramitas before it.  

Our first week we started with generosity. Our homework was to think about a way that we could realistically practice generosity with others, but also in a way that stretched us.  I decided to be generous with Boy 1 and Girl 1: to meet them with kindness and open ness each moment, each time, to be generous with my self, my time with them, and my interactions with them. I pictured myself, physically, meeting them with open arms, rather than clinching myself in protection or attempting to control them.

 I knew it would be hard but I thought, “Eh, I can do this for five days.” Then I thought, “What a nice way to end the year with them. Won’t it be nice to not yell at them, to not get upset with them, to stop trying to control them? Won’t they be so much happier? Won’t I be so much less stressed?” Then I thought, “Uh oh, this sounds like I’m being generous for my own benefit- I don’t think that’s exactly the generosity we were looking for here.” I asked the teacher after class if it was okay, since I’m just a beginner, to be practicing generosity for my own benefit. She smiled and as she did, I answered my own question. “Oh,” I said. “Practicing generosity with an expectation that it’s going to benefit me is already setting me up for disappointment, huh?” But I decided to try it anyway.

Day 1: Absolute failure

As soon as Boy 1 walked in the classroom I rejected him. He asked if his friends could help set up the room (I let Boy 1 and his close friend help me every morning) and I immediately said no.  This, of course, resulted in two other disappointed third graders. Boy 1 asked why they couldn’t join us, I just repeated my answer. Boy 1 persisted. I asked Boy 1 if he wanted to leave with the other two and not help out that morning. Boy 1 said , “No no no, I want to help!” Boy 1’s friends walked away in disappointment and, honestly, so did I.

I don’t know why I said no to the other kids helping. Actually, I do know why: I was afraid. I was thinking that if the other two helped out, we’d run out of things to do or that it would change the dynamic and Boy 1 would feel rejected by his peers. I didn’t want to deal with that. I wanted things to be the way they always were. I thought I could control the situation by sending away the other kids. I thought I could control the future. Instead, I just made three third graders feel rejected and made myself feel pretty bad. I remember thinking, “Great, this is supposed to be the easy one and you haven’t even succeeded at it!”

Day 2: Generosity until recess

On Monday, after much reflection on my issues around generosity (fear, control, boundaries, awareness that it’s not about me), I felt much more willing to try to be generous with Boy 1 and Girl 1. Unfortunately,  they were both absent that day. This was good and bad at the same time. Because they weren’t garnering so much of my attention, I could actually be much more open and tolerant with the rest of the class. And I was. They were super talkative in the morning but I didn’t  try to control them around this. I kept seeing their talking for exactly what it was: third graders being interested in a topic and spontaneously speaking about it. There were times when it got loud but when I listened, they were talking about the National Anthem (which is what we were studying) so I let them be. I didn’t insert my self in to the situation, I didn’t interpret their talkativeness through my fears around classroom management or control of the classroom. I just let them be.

After recess, however, the talking got to be a little too much. I couldn’t teach because they wouldn’t stop talking to each other. I started to threaten, to take away recess, and I began to see their behaviors through my own delusions of parents’ criticism: that I give too much attention to the ‘bad’ kids and that their kids have to sit around and wait while the ‘bad’ kids get it together. They stopped talking, but they weren’t any more engaged and I felt stressed and unhappy.

Day 3: The blow up

Boy 1 and Girl 1 were back at school the next day and all the worse for wear for missing a day of school. I was tolerant with them in the morning and was surprised by how willing I was to meet them each moment, to not let their prior behavior taint their current behavior. I basically just acted like each moment was brand new. But they were pretty disruptive and kept kind of derailing the class. I made them sit at recess, hoping that would somehow change their behavior. It didn’t, they did the same stuff after recess as they did before. Boy 1 kept defying me, speaking to me disrespectfully, calling out, complaining, etc.

I don’t know how it happened but suddenly, I was pointing to the door and shouting “Out! You cannot stay in this room if you’re going to talk to me that way. Go to the office, call home, tell them to pick you up because your teacher can’t teach with you in the room.”

Boy 1 was terrified, embarrassed, rejected, and hurt. But this is what Boy 1 did. Boy 1 shook his head, refused to leave, stood in front of the chalkboard so that no one else could see it, etc. Then Boy1 said things like “You don’t like (insert race here) people.”  And “All you ever do is embarrass me.” And “You don’t love me, I can tell.”

Now I was hurt and embarrassed. It was pretty awful.  We ended up talking later and I apologized for raising my voice. I explained how much I loved him and that it wasn’t okay to talk to me like that. I said that our classroom was a safe place and that I wouldn’t let anyone talk to him like that so he can’t talk to me like that (of course, in my head I knew that I had yelled at him and talked to him the way I told him not to talk to me so, honestly, I should have been asked to leave the room too). It sucked.

Day 4: Trying again

I really did practice generosity with Boy 1 today. No matter how mean he was to me, I wasn’t mean back. He didn’t do his morning work and when he asked if he was on my ‘recess’ list, I answered honestly: yes, you are, you didn’t do your work in the morning so you have to do it at recess. He yelled and said all kinds of things about me but I didn’t engage in that with him because I knew it wasn’t true.  When he got involved in the next lesson, I told him how proud I was of him for the hard work he was doing. When he rolled around on the carpet, I let him, I just kept on teaching and he eventually went back to his seat. I didn’t point out what he was doing wrong and I didn’t hold against him what he had done, I just responded to his behaviors as they showed up. When he felt rejected by his friends at recess and took it out on me “You never keep your promises!” I went back to teaching the lesson. I was honest with him about why I asked him to move his chair- it’s not because I like you more than the other person, it’s because your chair is closer. And I did this not to manipulate him but because it’s what was actually happening, it was the truth. And he responded to that.

It was interesting to not engage with him, to not try to control him. He did the same things, but they kind of fizzled out without my reaction to them. He didn’t do as much work and there were times when he disrupted the class, and I dealt with that, but he wasn’t yelled at today, he wasn’t rejected or sent out of the room. He did his stuff, but I didn’t do any stuff to him. And that feels okay. Yelling at him, or trying to change him, adds stuff to the suffering- it doesn’t make it go away.

I still need to find a balance around this. He can’t not do his work, hang out in the hallway, talk to me disrespectfully, disrupt the class. But, one thing I noticed today (and, actually, every day that I’ve been more ‘tolerant’ of their behavior, more open to them instead of trying to control them)  is that the other kids are watching my reaction. It’s like a tennis match. Someone misbehaves and immediately, all 19 other eyes turn to me, watching to see what I’m going to do about it. I used to think that I needed to admonish the kid, set them as an example of what will happen if you misbehave. But in the reading, they talked about forgiveness and how much forgiveness is about not being controlled by resentment  or hatred. They also talked about how, when we forgive others, we act as models for the community, showing them that they too don’t have to be controlled by resentment or hatred.

And I think that’s a bigger lesson for the kids to see in me: that I don’t need to get angry, that actually, I am more in control of this classroom by not retaliating against the kids, not threatening them, just responding to them. I don’t know, I’m still unsure about this but today, I know, that I didn’t cause  more suffering for Boy 1. And I’m okay with that- that feels like more important than making him do exactly what I wanted him to do exactly when I asked him to do it.