Duties, in theory, are no fun at all, but they are necessary. Breakfast duty has always been my favorite. At my school this meant seeing a lot of kids every morning. Every kid needs something different in the morning. Some of them want you to leave them alone because they’re still waking up, some of them want you to call them by their superhero name. That one tended to be tricky because their superhero name changed every day and my guess was almost always wrong. Some of them want to see how many steps you’ve already had this morning and though they’d likely deny, they wanted the math problem that came with figuring out how many more steps I’d need to meet my goal by the end of the days. Some of them just want a smile, a good morning, and their breakfast. For some of them, breakfast could make or break their entire day.
This story begins, as so many school stories begin, with a student who refused to comply with a direction. I asked her to take her hood off. She refused. I told her to take her hood off. She refused. I reminded her it was a school rule (one we thankfully jettisoned years ago). She refused. She didn’t just refuse, she was adamant that hood was not coming off. I was about to lose my mind and my cool when I took a deep breath. There are a couple of moments in my teaching career that were turning points for me. This was one of them.
In the moment I took to take that breath I remembered that this student needed some grace. In that moment I also remembered that sure, there were other times she pushed back, because she was a fourth grader and all fourth graders do at one time or another, but she’d never pushed back like this. She was absolutely clear that her hood would not be coming off.
We ended up in my classroom, across from the cafeteria. I asked what was wrong, because by then, I’d finally realized something was. It was her hair. Her mom hadn’t had time to do it and she didn’t want anyone to see it. I’ll confess, I was about to shrug it off. I’d coaxed her to take her hood off where no one but me could see it, and I didn’t think it looked that bad. That wasn’t the point though. She thought it did and it was clear this one thing was going to ruin her entire day. I was also smart enough to know that, as a white teacher, I was going to be able to solve the issue, I went back to the cafeteria to get one of our amazing instructional assistants to ask if she could help.
She took one look at my teary-eyed friend, asked me if I had any hair bands and told her she’d have it fixed in no time at all. About 10 minutes later they both came back to the cafeteria: Hood off, hair looking great, student with a big smile on her face.
I went out that day, bought hair bands in all colors, a comb, and a brush. That was not the last time Ms. Paige saved someone’s day that year. We kept the stash in a big walk-in closet in my classroom (it used to be the music room). Word got out that if someone was having a bad hair day, Ms. Paige was the answer.
It was that day where I finally understood the phrase behavior is communication. It was that duh moment that was entirely too long in coming. I still cringe when I think back to all of the times I engaged in petty power struggles because I didn’t understand that one very important piece of the puzzle.
Last week I watched Ms. Paige solve a completely different problem with the same level of grace and skill as she had when she fixed that student’s hair. When our new problem had been solved, I took a moment to remind her of the hair band incident. I hope she knows I was serious when I told her how much that incident had changed who I was as a teacher. Another reminder that we do not pay our instructional assistants nearly as much as they deserve.