"Mom I need some paper and markers it's really important Mom it's basically like an emergency, please."
Clementine said this to me last night while I was making dinner - right at the really busy part when everything is about to be done at the same time and you can't just walk out of the kitchen, you know?
But she just turned 8, so she's basically a teenager. She knows where the paper and markers are kept, and I reminded her as much. I figured she had a note to write to a friend or some kind of snarky reminder to post on her older sister's bedroom door.
But when I stepped into the dining room to set the salad on the table, I noticed her hard at work in the living room. "Where should the peace rugs go, Mom?" she asked me. "They have to be in a place where there's plenty of room and it's easy to get to them."
Peace rugs. I vaguely remembered her classroom teacher mentioning this during parent-teacher conferences. When two kids in their 2nd grade class get into a disagreement, or someone has their feelings hurt, they give the peace pass to the classmate with whom they are in conflict as an invitation to sit together on the rug and go through these steps:
Arrive calm.
Explain what happened without blaming.
When that happened, I felt _____________________.
In the future, please _____________________.
To feel better, I need ______________________.
Agree on the solution.
Entirely of her own initiative, Clementine made peace rugs for our family, complete with a peace pass and a reminder of the statements for conversation.
I thought that was nice. I thought it was cute. I snapped a pic to send to her teacher with words of gratitude. I meant them, don't get me wrong, but also dinner was hot and I was hungry and so I called everyone to the table and we ate and then we went about our evening.
And I kind of forgot about the whole thing, to be honest.
But tonight? Tonight, after dinner, when my husband was out and I was doing bedtime alone with the girls, I was just done. I needed my kids to be in bed. They were supposed to be on their way there when I could hear them getting into some little spat over which books were whose. I was over it. I went upstairs to fold clothes in the hopes they could work it out on their own.
I came back downstairs a few minutes later expecting to find them still arguing, or each in her own room with a sour attitude, but instead I found them on the living room rug, sitting criss-cross-applesauce and facing each other.
"What are you girls doing?" I asked. I was kind of exasperated about it. "You're supposed to be in bed!"
"Um, we're using the peace pass," Clem said. Her tone was basically, "Duh, Mom."
I let them be. After just a few more minutes they were laughing together, and then they headed into their bedrooms.
"Wait, that's it?" I asked. "You're all done arguing?"
They were.
"And I didn't have to get involved? And you're not all crabby about it??"
They were not.
It was like magic. I've been parenting for nearly 12 years. I feel like I leveled up tonight but I didn't have a damn thing to do with it. This was entirely Clementine's teacher, modeling conflict management in a classroom full of 7 and 8-year-old children.
There are an awful lot of strong feelings in St. Paul and Minneapolis right now about teachers and ESPs and social workers and food service workers and everyone else who works to make our schools successful for these kids. We fully expect a strike to begin in a matter of days.
And I want you to know that it's not about math and reading and standardized test scores. Like, maybe that's 10% of it. The rest is these literal magicians teaching our children how to be people - how to feel their feelings and manage their conflicts and approach problems with curiosity - and the idea that we can't even pay them a living wage, much less a wage in line with other districts in the metro area, is just such utter garbage that I don't even know where to begin.
The world is on fire. In some ways, it always has been, but tonight *actual* nuclear power plants are burning because grown-ass leaders who are drunk on power never had an elementary school teacher take the time to sit them down and teach them how to work through their feelings.
These educators are magicians, full-stop. But their magic will run out at some point. They can't show up day after day full of magic for our kids if they also have to bartend into the early hours of the morning just to put food on the table. They can't know all of our kids well enough to understand just what each child is carrying onto the peace rug when their class sizes keep creeping up. School counselors and social workers cannot provide quality and consistent mental health care when their services are split among multiple sites. When their annual raises never even come close to keeping up with the cost of living, the magic these educators bring will inevitably begin to fray around the edges.
It doesn't have to be this way. We can do better for our educators and school staff, magicians across the board.
It doesn't have to be this way.
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