A few times this year my wonderful wife has sent me to work to help with our “VISA repayment plan” (it’s the least I can do considering she’s pregnant and working full time). So I’ve embarked on a few stints of substitute teaching. It’s been, surprisingly, amazingly educational.
Last week I found myself in a gymnasium with two classes of Gr.4 boys, organizing and refereeing “The Super Hockey Championships” between team green-hockey-sticks and team orange-hockey-sticks. We had a mini-training camp where we did stutter steps until there were two kids standing, lines with push-ups and sit-ups intermixed, and running races. It was serious business. And if it was something other than “The Super Hockey Championship” right afterward, they would’ve been too bagged to play. But it wasn’t, and the training-camp made the game all the more important.
I noticed one of the little boys right at the start of the class. He was very athletic and a couple of times I caught him whispering things to his teammates. What he said couldn’t have been nice considering how deflated the recipients of the messages looked once the whispering ended … and the scowl on the whispering boys face confirmed my suspicion. I thought to myself, “I better keep an eye on this one.”
Each team had an A-shift and a B-shift. They were to take turns playing every three minutes. Four minutes into the game and one minute into B-shifts first shift, I noticed that a frumpy and clumsy looking boy hadn’t played yet. I walked over and asked him if he wanted to play. He nodded fiercely. I asked why he wasn’t playing and he looked up at the whispering/scowling boy. “Hmmm … ” I thought. I gave whispering/scowling boy a penalty and insisted that frumpy/clumsy boy play during the penalty plus another shift to make up for his lost time.
Ten minutes later I announced, “4 minutes left!” At the same time I caught the same team trying to keep frumpy/clumsy boy on the bench … but this time it was another boy. This meant that new-penalty-boy would sit on the bench, and someone else from that team would have to come off so frumpy/clumsy boy could play. I chose whispering/scowling boy. He slammed his stick on the gym floor.
It was a close end to the game. The team taking all the penalties was trying to protect their one goal lead, and swarms of orange and green hockey sticks clashed and banged in that tiny little gymnasium. For these Gr.4 kids it meant everything. It was epic. And out of the corner of my eye I saw whispering/scowling boy wipe a tear from his eye. I realized he had only played about 4 minutes of the 20 minute game. I recalled how hard he worked in training camp. I thought how badly he wanted to win. How excluded he likely felt. How unfair it was that this strange man was making him miss the most important game of Gr.4 hockey. His tears were so real that I felt silly and ashamed.
And then I thought how we’re all this way. We’re all big kids. Some of us scowl and whisper, some of us klutz around, and most of us do other sorts of things. But at the end of the day, we all just want to be included. We just want to be part of the action. To be liked. To be acknowledged and validated by our peers and the people we look up to. But we forget these things as we get older because we get so good at hiding our feelings, forgetting that all of our own feelings – and other people’s too – come from the same place regardless of our age.
So I let the whispering/scowling boy with the face full of tears start playing before his team penalty “officially” ended with a nod and a smile. And I don’t know if it was the fact that he could play, or the knowing, warm look I gave him, but you should have seen his eyes light up. And maybe that was all the little tyke needed in the first place … just a bit of acknowledgment and validation.
And maybe that’s what all of us are looking for … the same things kids are: fair rules, solid boundaries, high-expectations, and a little bit of encouragement and validation along the way.
