For Christa

In my first year of teaching I had a second grade class, year 2, made up of 7 and 8 year olds. Christa arrived, along with everyone else in the class, with the school materials listed in the registration packet given out before the start of school. She also arrived ready to do whatever it took to be good at school. She was intelligent, quiet but not shy, physically active and a little competitive. Her mother worked and took good care of she and her brother in a solo parent household. When I sent out a wish list to parents which included cushions to make a nice reading area for the children, Christa's mother was the one who responded, sending in 6 little pillows which worked beautifully.

Christa had everything going for her, and she knew it. She had a caring parent who provided clothing , good food, and all her necessities, she had the ability and the desire to crack the whole mystery of learning to read and all the rest, she had good health and was a fast runner. But on that first day of second grade, Christa brought in everything on the list and looked around to see that her classmates brought in so much more. While Chirsta's mother made sure she had what she needed, most children in the class had those basics and in addition a lot of extras. Glitter glue, gel pens in a rainbow of colors, the latest Miss Kitty notepads and sundry were unloaded into school desks. As I watched Christa out of the corner of my eye, I could see the immediate impact of this unequal distribution of supplies. While she could compete with her classmates on the playground and in the classroom, she could not compete with their consumption level. I could see that it hurt her, and I could see that it was not new to her, it was just another chapter of the same story.

It made me angry to see how that level of competitive consumption could impact my class. It affected social groups (Christa was not welcome in the group of extravagant comsumers) and it had subtle effects on interactions in the classroom. Common wisdom said this was the way of the classroom and was unavoidable, but it haunted me throughout that first year of teaching. I saw things through Christa's eyes. All of the expensive sillly things like gel pens were misused and wasted, caps left off, glue leaking in desks. The children had so much superfluous stuff and no framework for dealing with such surplus, thus waste abounded. It was not simply that distribution was unequal, it was that the surplus was doing no one any good.

I moved to teach in a different school the following year, taking a first year class, the lessons I learned still fresh in my mind.  I sent out a letter to each of the families in my new class telling them to send their children with only the materials listed on the basic school supplies list and to keep any of the surplus purchases at home, where students could use them more effectively for school projects or home art projects. I explained that all of the materials would be put together and their child would not necessarily be using the pencils they themselves had brought in, so there was no reason to buy the fancy version of anything.

What a difference it made to the whole learning experience. Pencils were kept in trays and were not replaced until they were down to the nub. When a child has a pencil and personal pencil sharpener at their own desk, pencils get used up quickly. In this classroom, a child who loved sharpening would take on sharpening a whole tray of them, satisfying his or her need, while not running a single pencil down right away. The materials were in service of the work needing to be done and everyone shared in looking after Our Materials.

There were fewer social hierarchy arrangements and groups were more fluid that year. Most important for me was that I did not have to witness on a day to day basis the inherent inequality of materials distribution. I couldn't solve the big problems in the world, but I could make the interactions in my little world more positive. As a class we played with the whole notion of abundance without consciously labeling it such. At the end of the school year, because everything had been used judiciously, there was a tremendous surplus of materials still in the supply cabinet. We shared out this surplus and each child took home a bag which contained pencils, crayons and assorted other things to use over the summer.

What I learned is that every situation has opportunities for change and we can play around with our assumptions and they way we structure things to effect different outcomes. I don't take anything for granted because none of it is set in stone, and much of it is in the set up. I wish Christa could have benefitted directly from my learning that first year, but the fact that she didn't has been a driving force for the rest of my life. I am still trying to make things right for Christa.