Panther Power-Ups

(I assigned my students to write a kind of essay we call a “personal narrative” which includes an incident, response, and reflection, and I’ve been pondering something myself, so I thought I’d write one to use as a model. I hope they’ll appreciate it. Maybe you’ll like it, too.)

Benjamin Gorman

Mr. Gorman

English 1, Period 1, 3, and 4

March 5, 2022

Panther Power-Ups

We have so many vital lessons to teach children, and so many are reactions to the dangerous lies they are taught by our world. Here are a few truths I’ve been contemplating today:

Secrets, in general, are bad. If adults tell kids to keep secrets, all our radar should go off. And if adults are trying to stop other adults from telling kids the truth, that should worry us, too. Instead, we can teach kids about the value of truth by showing them that the joy of a secret is in it’s revelation. Sure, it’s fun to know what’s inside the wrapping paper and keep that secret until the gift is given, but the joy comes in the revealing. As they get older, we can reveal a more nuanced version of this truth. Sometimes telling a secret isn’t joyous, exactly. But it’s a relief. Even if the truth is uncomfortable, even if it’s the kind of truth some adults don’t want them to know, don’t want them to hear, don’t want them to speak, it should come out. A dream deferred rots or explodes. A truth hidden may vanish.  

So I want to tell kids a secret or two and encourage them to reveal these truths. They have the power to decide if they reveal them today or wait until the holiday where their secrets are revealed. That’s up to them, and they get to revel in the pleasure of the telling. 

Here are a couple secrets they’ve been pressured to keep, to bottle up, to hide: They are smart. And they are powerful. I’m not positive why we don’t encourage kids to reveal these secrets. I have guesses. Some of it may come from a religious impulse to be humble. If so, maybe we need to unpack that. Would it really hurt a deity if Its creations owned their intelligence and power? Would it diminish the deity Itself? If so, what a fragile kind of omnipotence. I doubt that. Instead, I think it serves the priest caste to tell believers not to own their intelligence and power too much, lest they question the religious leaders.

But maybe the origin of this secret-keeping isn’t religious at all. Maybe it’s an outgrowth of a healthy impulse to care for the welfare of the people around us mixed with an unhealthy capitalist impulse to make everything competitive. After all, if we can’t say “I’m smart,” or “I’m powerful,” without saying, “I’m smarter than you are,” or “I’m more powerful than you are,” then of course we will hurt the people around us. But what if we could learn, at a young age, to own our intelligence and power without learning it must be at the expense of the child sitting at the desk next to ours? What if we could learn that our gifts are different, our insights complimentary, our power compounding when we work together? Who might benefit? Almost everyone. (And here I reveal I’m just as much a product of capitalism as everyone else.) Who would lose if we knew that? Who might have a motive to keep us from seeing those truths about ourselves? Could it be we’re told to keep these secrets by the people who want us to work for their benefit in factories or fields or restaurants or cubicles for wages that don’t honor our intelligence and power? If so, acknowledging our intelligence and power is a revolutionary act. 

I encourage kids to stand up and say it. “I’m smart.” Own it. “I’m powerful.” And together? “With the people around me, we’re even smarter and more powerful.”

But here’s another secret we hide: Some days we won’t feel smart. Some days we won’t feel powerful. I have competing theories about why we keep our self-doubts secrets, too. Part of me thinks we hide these facts from kids because it might frighten them to know the adults in their lives lack the intelligence and ability to protect and provide for them. They need to know we’ve got their backs even on our own dark days. That’s an understandable reason to withhold. But part of me suspects we don’t reveal these truths to kids for the same reasons we don’t reveal them to other adults, the same reasons we don’t like to admit them to ourselves. We don’t want to be vulnerable because we worry articulating our doubt will speak an immutable prophecy into existence. So we model bottling things up and hiding them away. And kids see through us. Know why? Because they are smart.

Before the pandemic, I used to high-five my students as they came into my classroom. Ah, yes, remember those halcyon days when human contact didn’t feel like a roll of the dice? How naïve I was. My classroom is at the end of a long hallway on the first floor. A stairwell starts just outside my door, and I would lean on the handrail that comes down into the middle of the hall, hold up a hand (sometimes very high for those ninth graders who are already taller than their teacher) and welcome them. There, I could catch the kids coming from the other end of the hall and also the ones coming down the stairs. Not all students wanted to high five, and that was fine. In fact, I distinctly remember one student who never wanted to high five, and our lack-of-high-five became a bit of bonding; I’d see her coming and immediately drop my hand, and she would smile appreciatively at not being put on the spot. It was enough for her that she felt recognized as she came into the room, and her appreciation was enough for me. Most students did like the high fives, though. Many would keep high fiving years after they were in my classes, just touching base as they went by on their way to Sophomore English, Spanish 3, Senior American Government, graduation, college, jobs, a galaxy of varied and sparking futures. Some of my ninth graders would have preferred complicated daps, I’m sure, but I lean into my old, uncool white guy-ness, and they accept my limitations. I cannot even map their galaxy of potential, just give my little gravitational nudges. 

When the rumors of the pandemic started to spread, I realized high fives were not wise. Even when we’d only heard about a single case in Seattle, I worried a proffered high five would make a student feel uncomfortable rather than welcomed. I started bumping elbows. Then I realized that posture just inclined us both even more into one another’s breathing space. Next I started kicking the inside of my shoe against the inside of the shoe of any student who wanted that welcome. It was fun but cringed at the thought I’d scuff up some kid’s nice white shoes with my galumphing combat boots. Some of my kids take their shoe game very seriously. 

Before I’d found some fourth alternative, we were all sent home. 

In retrospect, I wonder if I should have incorporated some kind of virtual high five into the beginning of my online classes. We talked frequently about trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy. Or, to be more accurate, I talked about it … to a screen of mostly empty squares, the world’s worst game of Tetris where every row was filled by the same shape, no points were scored, and nothing moved for over a year. 

During that time, there were a lot of days when I didn’t feel smart or powerful. I didn’t feel dumb, exactly. I felt insensible, dulled, as though someone had brained me with a hammer. I did feel powerless, though. It manifested as fatigue. I remember commiserating with a friend who’s also a psychologist. I told her I was worried because I was taking two or three naps a day. 

“You’re depressed. And there are a lot worse ways you could choose to cope with that depression,” she told me. “Your body is telling you what it needs. Take the naps.”

So I took the naps. And I cried the tears I needed to cry. We all had a lot of things to mourn. Activities. Connections. People. And more people. Here’s another secret: On my list of things I was mourning, certainly lower than the missed last visit with my grandfather, lower than the dear friends I still mourn, but, full confession, probably higher than most of my failed romantic relationships of the Covid era (sorry), and higher than the novels I thought I’d write and the vacations that had to be postponed, I was mourning the loss of those high fives. I needed my kids. They are smart. They are powerful. They lift me up. 

Now we’re entering a liminal stage, an estuary between the dangerous fast-moving river of pandemic Covid and the wide sea of endemic Covid. Some of us will be taking off our masks, some keeping them on, and we’ll return Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear The Mask” to the curriculum because it can mostly go back to being metaphorical and hurting the way it's supposed to. I’m going to make a proposal to my students. With the assurance that I’ll be using a lot of hand sanitizer, I’m going to offer high fives again. They’ll be optional just as they always were, but now I will understand them differently, and maybe my kids will, too. While I ask, “How’s it going today?” the high five won’t just be saying, “Welcome to my classroom.” Instead, I’m going to call them “Panther Power-Ups.” (We’re the Panthers, and a lot of us are gamers, so we know what a power-up is.) When my students are feeling that their red health bar or blue mana bar is running a little low, when they don’t feel smart or powerful that day, I want them to experience that contact as an infusion of my confidence in them.

I’m going to draw a picture of myself giving a high five to a student on my whiteboard. She’ll have a thought bubble coming out of her head that says, “I need to know someone thinks I’m smart and powerful.” But I want the kids who are feeling good that day to understand the power-up is an exchange. I’ll have a thought bubble coming out of my head, too. It will say, “I need to know someone needs to know I think they’re smart and powerful.”

Because I need them, too.

That’s a secret I’ve learned.

And secrets should not be kept secret.