Being Human
As a beginner teacher, I had two big struggles.
The first was a lovable but challenging class. They were disruptive, disengaged and difficult. Their behaviour swung on a perilous pendulum of aggravation to apathy. Known across the school as a problematic class, the focus in conversations with other teachers always centred on managing their behaviour as opposed to actually teaching them anything. The students themselves saw me as an intruder constantly interrupting their chatter. I despaired of ever helping them over the hill of their own disenchantment — of being in school, of being in my classroom, of being made to read and write.
I made a resolve to experiment. They were meant to be learning how to write their own short stories. But first, I began telling them stories. They’d close their eyes and put their heads on the desk and listen to the voices of story tellers, speech makers and slam poets. They met a former slave who taught himself to read, a thief of books and a boy who survived the concentration camps, amongst others.
I wanted to somehow show them, with examples of courage, empathy and sacrificial love, something of what it truly means to be human. It was a painful process but they began to listen. And sometimes, when the story had finished, they would sit there in silence, sometimes spellbound, sometimes stupefied. And if I’d really taken them with me — they would, at a gentle prompt write furiously about their own memories, questions and ideas, creating their own often hilarious and sometimes sad, stories.
And what about their own stories? They write them in their books in class but sometimes they come to me with ones they can’t write and this is the second struggle. An eleven year old boy, with scabby knees and a floppy fringe that falls into his eyes, sits on a table outside my classroom, legs swinging and tells me his story.
“I’ve never told anyone all that.” He admits with a dull voice, pushing his fringe out of flint eyes. He’s not the only one. They come to me with their stories, buckling under the weight of them. And sometimes I go home and get down on my knees to pray and I don’t even know where to begin.
So, I tell myself the oldest story I know, that a Redeemer is on His way and He cares for each of these little ones more than I ever could. And that’s why I’m passionate about reading, writing and telling stories: to pinprick the darkness with flickers of light. I am but a pale flicker, but every candle in the darkness counts — each points to the one Story that eclipses all the others into glorious light.
