Becoming a confidant to her students, allowing them to pour out their secrets safely, without any criticism, giving the students a safe place to grow up stronger than they were before, translated…
Dearest Teacher, you will never know,
That there’s a small hole at the corner of the classroom walls
Where the wind blows in, the rains seep through
You can see the butterflies dance in the flowers
The rainbow appearing
You can even see the unicorn, flying over the moon
The shooting star breaking through the night skies constantly
The Astro Warriors, landing on Mars
My dearest teacher
I will, NEVER let you know any of this……………
At first, I only intended to guide my students to find the love in writing. In order to not get too cheesy about it, I’d, used the pictures every now and then, and had them write more than fifty characters at their own free will, in which they could trade in for not copying the assignments down on their assignment book for three days. I’d never imagined, how the eighth story “Secret” from Jimmy Liao’s “Photo Album” could’ve, gotten this student to disclose so much to me.
illustration from the paper
The original picture on the left side was the backside of someone wearing a clown’s hat, standing next to the corner of the wall with the long wooden panels, with the words, the student being punished to stand on the right side of the page, started showing smiles in between the golden rays of the sun, passing between the leaves of green. I’d handed my students the left page, and, only left the top and bottom lines of the original text, and stated that other than cuss words, they can write anything about this, that everything they’d written it’s between me and them alone.
The second year middle schoolers, how creative can they be? Some saw the ants moving their cargos, some stressed how this was more fun than copying things from the blackboard, or rather, it’s, their cheat-cheat between the wooden strips, how the characters were making the teacher angry, and punished to stand against the walls for five minutes each. And, there were the contexts that reflected “I-Spy”, “My secret. Don’t you think I know what you’re trying to do? This is a way, of masking up our homework assignments! I knew it by first look, only fools will tell you~~like how my parents had done something recently…………”, this made me realized, that I need to find out what exactly was, going on in that particular student’s home! What was most shocking was that really good looking, most popular girl in the class, wrote out how she was, singled out maliciously, how she’d, felt so, desperate! Is this, creativity, or, a call for help?
The hardest to manage, in the middle school years, are the bullying between the girls. Which was why I’d, gone to a private co-ed school instead of an all-girls’ school, until I’d started teaching, I’d still, gotten along better with the boys. The roles of the bully, the victim, the bystanders, were all made, by the separate conditions of their, separate families; in order to break it all down, we’d need to, accompany the students—to help them realize that they’d, acquired this invisible value they’d not been made aware of from childhood, and dig up the fears from within the students. This is something that’s very difficult and very enormous to do, and, if I weren’t careful, there may be, even MORE casualties. As the changes in relationships don’t normally happen overnight, and these things takes time, like those, weekly episodes of the soaps, being patient, paving the way, hitting the notes on the sides, and only the individuals can understand, what the teacher’s purpose was, and they’d, become more at ease, to pass through each hard day at school, with their trusts in their school teachers, until, one day, they can, finally, see the light.
a mailbox for all our secrets…
Thankfully, after this year, nobody was their, original self anymore, and became, phoenixes, that’s, weathered through their, separate trials of fire.
And since, I’d, gotten, one less secret to keep too.
And so, this, is how this teacher created this safe space, to get her students to, open up about things, and, she’d, given them an outlet, to show their true selves, to express their fears, without being, ostracized, judged, criticized, she’d, created this, safe place for them, and this is going to benefit the students, for the long run, and this is the sort of lesson that’s not written in the textbooks!