Snowflakes for Sandy Hook...and For Two More

The week following the tragedy in my hometown, Newtown, the students periodically asked questions about it all--about the kids at Sandy Hook, about Newtown, about the officers stationed at WPS. I fielded these questions gently, addressing concerns and questions in a way that acknowledged their importance and relevance while respecting and preserving the amount of knowledge students had or didn't have about all of this.

On the afternoon of Thursday, December 20, though, students happily snipped and turned and colored and wrote on plenty-a-snowflake for Sandy Hook. (Since then, I have learned that Chalk Hill School in Monroe, where the students will attend, has a total blizzard of paper snowflakes blowing in from kids all over the state). Nonetheless, the sense of quiet urgency and little paper snowflakes cut with care that filled 2B that afternoon was lovely and heart warming.

At the end of the day, students packed up as usual and waited in line in the classroom, chatting animatedly, to board their buses, as usual. I walked them down the hall and towards the double doors near the art room--all of this was very ordinary. The two officers were standing at the end of the hallway doing their job, making us all feel safe, as we should. But then something really pretty extraordinary happened. Our second grader leading the line stopped abruptly. She hurriedly plunged her hand into her fluffy, pale pink coat pocket and held her hand out towards the first officer we saw. She looked up at him and said "thank you for protecting us." She slowly slipped a small paper snowflake from her hand into his. Of course, I teared up immediately. But then, when I thought it couldn't get any more meaningful--at least five of our other second graders slid their hands into their pockets and did the same, now to both police officers. I thought I was the only crier...but I looked at both officers and locked eyes with them--all three of our eyes were shining with tears.

In the last post, I blogged about the importance of kindness in 2B--really, in every classroom and every home and every town across the nation. I talked about the epic responsibility to TEACH kindness. But in this moment that passed all too quickly, my students proved that they've got it, and they're taking it into their own hands (quite literally) to be kind on their own. And those kinds of moments? Those are the ones that whisper in my heart that I am the lucky one, to be graced with these children as their teacher.