Relationships, Community, & Battling Rejection

I've been spending a great deal of time wondering about how well I will be able to cope with everyday situations within my own classroom. More specifically, how will I encourage and foster new relationships to begin and grow within my classroom?

I've been reading multiple articles and books that cross reference this idea of community based classrooms and how they are constructed. Why a community-based classroom you ask? Why not? The most important role of a community-based classroom for me is just one of the building blocks for successful teaching and learning. When I aim to create a setting where each student feels safe and accepted, my motivation for doing so will be the result of many new positive relationships and friendships. Without these positive school relationships, it's easy to feel lost, unwanted, and alone. How awful it feels to be unwanted by a group of students and to be told you cannot play. Because it is impossible to be accepted by everybody every time, this problem of public rejection must not continue. When students feel unwanted their entire self becomes focused on why they aren't good enough and why they have been excluded. Because I never want my students to feel separated or unwanted, I hope to focus much of my attention on the idea of a community based classroom where students are willing to co-exist no matter who may be part of the community.

Vivian Paley's book titled, You Can't Say You Can't Play, allows outsiders like you and I to see how rejection affects children. Both teachers and parents are often the ones who hear about stories of rejection and are sometimes at a loss of words of how to make these situations less painful. For me, it's easy to thumb through my childhood memories and relive a time where I felt rejected. This feeling is so easy to relive because I still associate rejection will feelings of sadness, anger, bitterness, jealousy, and loss of self-worth. An entire community has no hope of successfully developing into it's full potential if limitations are set. When one student is told they can't play because they don't have the "right" kind of shoes on the rejection they feel immediately makes them feel unwanted and disconnected from the group. I find Paley's rule "You Can't Say You Can't Play" to be a great motto. If this rule can work for a group of twenty something students who struggle with creating an ideal community-based learning environment, relationships will begin because those who were previously rejected are now given the opportunity to grow with one another rather than alone.

Even though I was once a student who often dealt with rejection, my new role as teacher brings on a new challenge. Because I am not yet a teacher, I am still unfamiliar with how student relationships begin, grow, and sometimes crumble. If I can keep Paley's rule and adopt it as my own, will I be able to strengthen my ability to foster new relationships and help them grow? I like to think of myself as an optimist and so I will say "yes!" Paley states something rather alarming yet very true, "Rejection in play is the forerunner of all the rejections to come."
(p. 27). It is sad to think that even if teachers exhaust the rule that says no one can't play, life will be a rude awakening for them. There will be times outside of the classroom where this rule is unknown and not followed. It will be my job as their teacher to remind them that rejection is a nasty feeling and that actions have consequences. It takes a lifetime to forget how it feels to be unwanted and that by rejecting someone you are telling them they aren't part of the community that was so long in the making.

Paley's book was difficult for me to get through because it was easy to see her classroom broken up into many small groups of students who were so dissaproving of one another. It wasn't until the end that she felt comfortable enough to enforce the rule. She wasn't sure if the rule was fair or even if it would work so she went to the students, she listened to their personal stories about rejection. I admire her for going to them because she taught me that the best way to understand your student's relationships is to ask. Never be afraid to question what you don't understand. Much of what I have rejected in life is most of what I don't understand. Wow. What a lesson learned!