Notes from public school - day 45

Wow. 

The first quarter of the 2019-2020 school year ended today.

Can you believe it?

We celebrated Acts of Kindness today.

What does kindness mean to you?

To me, it means this picture one of my students drew and colored for me.

As you can see, the picture is of her heart.

Ah, the heart.

Brian Doyle wrote an essay for the American Scholar titled Joyas Voladoras in which he considers the capacity of the heart.

“The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale,” he writes. “It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves...There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.”

The heart of my little student is like the blue whale’s heart.

The hearts within her pictured heart are all the small acts of kindness she practices each day at school - sitting beside a lonely student at lunch, catching tears on her shoulder of a student who has fallen down and skinned his knee on the blacktop during a dodge ball game, and straightening up all of the chairs and tables in the classroom when she thinks I’m not looking.

The stars within her pictured heart are all the dreams she carries of all that she can be in the world - dreams that could heal the sick, stand up for the underdog, and make the world a better place for all of us.

The hearts of all of my little students are like the blue whale’s heart.

They have the biggest hearts in the world.

I’m thankful to be building a classroom community with them.

I’m thankful to be listening to their hearts.