The Joy of Joining

It is 6:17 PM, and we are standing in a dark hallway, purple mood lighting interrupted by flashes of the battery-operated strobe lights duct-taped to the ceiling. Half a dozen eleventh-graders remain, sighing with pleasure at our handiwork.

"All the stress," the class vice president sighs. "It's so worth it!"

I look around and nod in agreement. We have swathed the lockers, walls, and floor in about four hundred yards of colored butcher paper. Stuffed paper Disney characters dangle from the ceiling, along with several glowing planets, some shooting stars, and a dozen tikki paper plates that I proudly hung myself. They've covered parts of the floor with sand, carted in by wagon and skateboard, from the beach four miles away. Soft Hawaiian music floats up from somewhere. THe library doors are covered in a beach tablecloth, and the adjacent classroom is also inaccessible, barricaded with red paper. Cutout stars, the hard work of two girls, three hours, and some very sturdy scissors, are scattered over the black paper floor, so that we float in outer-space as we survey the other-world our hallway has become.

Perhaps if I had shared in much of the actual stress--borne mostly by three ingenuous student officers--I might not think it was worth all the trouble. Apparently, my mere presence as the class advisor lent legitimacy to the proceedings, but I was a figurehead, a puppet leader. I was an extra pair of hands this afternoon (and several extra pairs of scissors), an obedient worker who happened to have a room full of stuff at her disposal. A teacher convenient for her tall stools for standing, and the occasional listening ear. And that's fine with me.

The instructional duties of my day ended four hours ago. I taught my last chaotic lesson, shut the doors, and entered Homecoming Land, where my only task was to cut out Disney characters and talk to students. A merciful break from planning--they had planned it all, already. I think about the relative weights of these two parts of my day, curricular and extra-curricular. Cognitive and affective, they would have called them in college. Leading and following. Teaching and being taught.

"You'll learn so much more than what they tell you in the classroom."

That's what I heard about college, and I remember laughing at it. In high school, I was Classroom Girl. Blessed with no more impressive skills than an endless capacity for memorizing facts, it is no wonder that I valued academics most. This business, the decorating and cheerleaders and football players yelling in the halls, I never noticed. "Secondary," I would sigh over the wasted resources.

But it was true, as I see today. The classroom is not the end of learning, even when it is my classroom. I see students learning to listen, learning to work together and to organize and take real pride in their work. And I am learning, year by year, what it means to "enter in" to the lives of my students, sharing in their passions as I ask them to share in mine.