Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Kindness

My partner is back in chemotherapy. We have been letting our friends and family know, making plans around work, schedules, accommodations, travel and seeing LOTS of health care providers. I have an excellent vantage point; I am not the one dealing with the physical, mental, and emotional stress of treatment, but I have ringside seats for everything. And from where I’m sitting, I think the most important virtue in the world is kindness.

Throughout all the interactions of recent weeks my partner has been treated with kindness. By doctors patiently explaining things she didn’t really want to hear, by nurses and technicians drawing blood and talking about side effects, by friends offering support in a myriad of ways . . .

Suffice it to say that kindness has been clearly evident in our daily lives, and has been making all the difference in how those days go.

I’ve always felt that kindness is grossly underrated. It is a simple concept and I believe it is inherent in each of us. But as with any inherent ability - to hit a golf ball or bake amazing bread - the key is practice.

How do we impress upon our children the importance of kindness? A good first step is always by making the unconscious, conscious. Bringing kindness to consciousness is easy enough. In the school where I work, we have a bulletin board with a crazy looking bird sticking out of it in a 3-D flurry of pink feathers. This bird is our GAK. On this bulletin board are tacked up dozens of tiny eggs that each record a Genuine Act of Kindness. Every Thursday morning in the school opening, we read out GAK’s. They are read by students or teachers and are meant to recognize the kindness of anyone in our school community – students first and foremost, but also teachers and aides and the secretary and the bus driver and parent volunteers and the library volunteers and the hot lunch providers and . . . well, you get the picture. We are acknowledging and reinforcing the virtue of kindness in the students but more importantly, we have showcased a particular aspect of life for them to observe and evaluate.

This is how we learn, is it not? We observe, we mimic, we internalize. Kids need to have kindness highlighted for them. With the GAK program, they learn what it is and then they watch for it. They become attuned to it, whether they are involved in the act or not. They have opportunities to observe the offering as well as the acceptance of kindness and they get to see the results for both parties. This is the thing I most love to see on the playground. One child stopping to assist another is great; three more children observing the interaction and feeling the energy created by an act of kindness is of immeasurable value.

But of course, there is always the risk of the focus sliding to the “reward”. A kindergarten student stood holding open the school door all recess in anticipation of the returning students, and when I asked her to close it and keep the warm air in, she replied, “But I want to be GAK’d!”

I watched this trend happen in a previous school and decided to find another route to helping kids explore kindness. It actually started as I stared at my poster of the Circle of Courage by George Blue Bird, Sr. I felt confident that my classroom gave children ample opportunity to experience and explore the other three virtues in the circle: Mastery, Independence and Belonging. But I felt the fourth virtue of Generosity was not a tangible part of my grade four program. So I created the Secret Agent Society. We each chose secret agent code names. We all took an oath of secrecy that only our class would know about the SAS. I made the kids Mission Journals in which they would record their weekly missions. Every Monday, they drew a slip from the can which held the names of every member of our school community. By Friday, they had to have secretly done something to make their target’s day a little brighter. Our goal was to bring smiles of happiness to the faces of our subjects.

Then the agent had to write it up in his or her journal (and my expectations of how creative or suspenseful their mission reports had to be, was commensurate with their writing ability) and make an oral report to the SAS on Friday morning as we ate our snacks. I liked the days when someone would report on their mission and, because of the secrecy component, would end with, “But I don’t know if they smiled or not.” Someone else would often fill it in for them, reporting on a smile or a response that the agent didn’t get to see. But even more, I liked the days when someone would report their mission, without benefit of knowing the result and would appear to be just as satisfied and pleased as if they had received a big, direct ‘thank you’.

It was fun – they got to be sneaky and we made up SAS drills for how to camouflage what we were doing if non-agents came into the room while we were having the oral reports or writing up mission logs. We even made up code names for the subjects. (Had to monitor that a little!)

Can we teach kindness? No. We can’t teach intelligence or talent either. Our job is to foster these things.

We strive to provide opportunities for students to recognize kindness, to appreciate its value, to truly feel its benefits and to find ways to practice incorporating it into their lives in a meaningful way.




Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."