I Saw Courage This Week.

I saw courage this week. Each day. Every class period. Inside my classroom. They came in. They showed up. They allowed others to see them, with all their quirks and with all their insecurities. But then I asked them to share their heart stories. I asked them to journal, to write down their thoughts and their feelings. The first topic? Shame. Yeah, that ugly word that we are all too familiar with yet we all want to avoid and ignore. But not in my classroom. Not when we’re reading The Scarlet Letter, and we watch a community of legalistic pricks shame Hester for her mistake. Courage: the willingness to share your heart story. The assignment: write about a time when you felt shame, when you felt embarrassed. You could have heard a pin drop. They all looked mortified! But then, I shared my shame story. The divorce. The way I tried to hide what was going on in our home. The shame I felt each time I realized afresh that my parents were no longer together. Their horrified looks morphed into understanding eyes. Their frozen heads began to slowly nod telling me they understood the feeling. Their ten minutes of writing finished, but their pens still scratched across the pages. Relief. I sensed relief in some of them. Relief that they could finally tell the story because in simply telling the story, they were confronting the shame. They were refusing to hide from it. As they wrote their feelings and their thoughts, they forced the shame to disappear. Journaling finished, books open, Hester Prynne in the spotlight. But now it’s different. Now they can relate to her. Now they connect their feelings of shame to hers. Trapped in the pages of a book, Hester can’t escape her shame. My students? They just won that battle. They just celebrated a victory. In the words of Brene Brown, they just owned their stories.

I saw courage this week. My seniors showed up. They came into class, a class that’s downright hard. British Literature. The reading isn’t always easy to understand, and writing papers seems more than daunting. Then there’s all the pressure they have from every angle of life to make good grades, go to exemplary colleges, lead the underclassmen, participate in extracurricular activities, sit still and pay attention in every class, create the best presentations, and well, just perform. This week, we talked about Hrothgar, that king in Beowulf who couldn’t stop the monster Grendel from destroying and brooding over his Danish kingdom. There he sat on his throne feeling demoralized, discouraged, inadequate, and not enough. Not brave enough. Not strong enough. Not wise enough. Courage: the willingness to share your heart story. Assignment: write about a time when you felt like you weren’t _________ enough. Their reaction: all eyes dropped to the floor. But when I said, “And here’s my not _________ enough story,” their eyes slowly wandered back and caught mine again. Ah! They were with me. They were listening. My story? I never felt popular enough. Growing up with my brother made for some extreme comparisons. He, one of the most popular kids on campus, and me, the not so popular kid. I wasn’t pretty enough, sociable enough, crazy enough. Now their eyes were glued to me. Apparently I wasn’t the only one in that room who had felt inadequate at some point. Then a question arose: “Miss Griffin, can I write about how I still feel inadequate? Does it have to be something from the past?” Wow. So I’m not the only one who still fights the “I’m not ________ enough” battle. And so they began. With their pens quickly moving across the pages, they filled up the lines with their stories. They confronted the feelings of inadequacy. They owned their stories. They brought courage to life.

I saw courage this week. Not on a battlefield. Not in a movie. Not in the literature I teach, but rather in the students who enter my classroom. And week three hasn’t even begun.