My former fifth-grade students — now seniors — returned to the elementary school where I have been watching for 26 years to walk the hallways one more time before graduating from high school. My current batch of students, alongside the rest of the kids in our school, lined the halls and “clapped them down” as they marched through the school, just as they had done seven years ago as fifth graders headed off to middle school.
One of my former students who later came back to say hello was especially dear to me. I had known her since she was a baby before she became my fifth-grade student.
I had actually changed her diaper at least once — a fact she never appreciated me bringing up.
More importantly, she was the last student whom I ever lifted off the ground.
About a month into the school year, I picked her up, tossed her on my shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and began carrying her across the room. She had partnered with her best friend again after I told her to find someone new, so I picked her up and was moving her to another group when my new principal entered the room.
“What are you doing?” he asked in a panic.
“Teaching reading,” I said. I really had no idea what he was talking about.
“Not that,” he said, “Why are you carrying that student?”
“Oh, I said. “I do this all the time.”
I told him that I would pick up students and move them to where they needed to be when they were annoying me. I didn’t do it every day. Just every now and then, when needed.
“It’s my thing,” I said.
Honestly, I think I saw it as perfectly natural. As a father who carried his kids in his arms and on his shoulders until they were too big to lift, and as a former Scout leader who would toss boys on his back or shoulders to carry them when they were tired or couldn’t get across a stream, I saw my students similarly:
Kids whom I cared for in the same way I cared for my own children or any other child.
Kids whom I loved.
So why wouldn’t I treat them the same?
A minute or two later, I was standing in the hallway with my principal, being told I could never lift a student off the ground like that again.
I couldn’t believe it. I had been carrying students for nearly two decades, including the former principal’s own daughter, who was my student years before.
No problem. No big deal.
Apparently, it was now.
So, although I’m a rule bender and sometimes a rule breaker who is always looking for an edge, I’m never blatantly insubordinate. When told not to do something, I don’t unless I can find a way around it semantically.
But there was no getting around this one. The instruction was clear and unequivocal.
So for the past seven years, students in my classroom have remained firmly on the ground, despite my occasional desire to lift them and carry them across the room.
“You’re the last student I will ever toss over my shoulder and carry across a room,” I told my former student, now all grown up and headed for college.
She thought this was a travesty.
Although I understand why I’ve been told not to lift kids off the ground and can see the rationale behind the decision, I agree with her. In our effort to remove risk from our world, we’ve created a sanitized, bubble-wrapped environment that is decidedly less fun and doesn’t give children the opportunity to take risks, learn from their stumbles, and grow from their falls.
As we continued to talk, my former student was appalled at all the other things that have been stripped from students since her days in my class:
Field trips, overnight camping trips, the stage in my classroom, select musical groups, competitive field day, and yes, my proclivity to lift kids off the ground and move them where I wanted.
“That’s terrible,” another one of my former students said. “They’ve taken all the best things. All the things I remember most.”
I agree.
“Why?” asked another. “Why did they take away all those great things?”
My answer is the same I give to anyone who wonders why something has been taken away from children in any school system:
It made adults’ lives easier.
Whenever something joyous, memorable, or epic is taken from students, it’s always done to simplify the lives of adults.
In my 26 years of teaching, I have never heard an administrator say:
“We are going to stop this fun, memorable, life-changing experience for children but replace it with something equally fun, memorable, and life-changing.”
Nope. It’s always subtraction. The equation is never rebalanced. As a result, children suffer.
And these things —bits of splendor and joy—are always taken away to make things easier on adults under the guise of recapturing instructional time, risk management concerns, changes due to the pandemic, or budgetary reasons, which is always a way of saying:
Funding this will be hard, and finding the time and resources required to make this happen will be hard, and we don’t want to undertake another hard thing, even if it would mean the world to the kids.
Want to know what’s important to kids?
Ask kids.
Ask my former students, ready to head off to college, about what was most meaningful to them during their time in elementary school.
They know better than anyone.
Granted, picking kids off the ground and hauling them to the other side of the classroom is probably not necessary, and I suspect that a fair number of parents would disapprove, so my principal probably did me a solid by bringing an end to this habit, even though it was perfectly fine for two decades.
But the other losses suffered by students across our country, as budgets are squeezed, teachers are overworked, and visionary leaders are replaced by efficient managers, are a tragedy.
School can’t only be about reading, writing, and math. It can’t be a place absent of fun, hilarity, and joy. It can’t be as forgettable as a day at the office.
Kids do best — academically, socially, and behaviorally — when they are having fun. Looking forward to the next day. Doing things they will remember forever.
When adults stop making that a significant focus of the school day, they fail children. They ensure that only the most motivated and supported kids succeed while leaving behind scores of children who require inspiration, purpose, joy, hilarity, and fun to get ahead.
My former students know this. They know it well.
Adults should, too.
