How can we tolerate the emotions of our sacred work of helping children thrive?  The responsibility is magnificent.  The pressure weighs down on us like an 80-lb pack.  And that’s if everything is going alright in life.

The reality is, we are always living this experience of three steps forward and two steps back.  We don’t want to step back.  We want straight forward.  It is emotional.  It is a regression.  It happens in children’s learning.  It happens in life.  All the time.

Faith, worthiness, selfhood, belonging, and changemaking aren’t realities in a child at a finite finishing point.  They are life-long journeys.  Then, we must address the practices of being in the dailyness of the five most important journeys.

There is conflict on the playground.  The children aren’t getting along.  In a small school the conversation and opinion swirl like fall leaves on a blustery day.  Most of all, in my office, I feel the emotion:  anger, grief, frustration, futility, judgment, fear, and sorrow.  In my many parent meetings, student meetings, and several teacher meetings, I feel all of this.

We are all looking for answers, solutions, and action items.  It needs to be immediate.  I can see the expectations pressing in with desperation in the eyes.

Ironically, what helps is spaciousness, curiosity, and connection.  Moments of mercy.  An expansion that allows us to re-frame our child’s experience and the experience of our learning community.  We might not know everything.  We can be curious.

This week, my Pastor queried, “When are you able to extend mercy?”  I wonder about our community learning how to manage, get along, and solve problems.  We need teaching and we need an experience of mercy.

I thought about the question many times this week.  When am I able to extend mercy?  After reading, listening, and reflecting,  I am able to extend mercy when my heart gazes down and accepts my own empty hands.  I need mercy too.  It is a place of acceptance.  We all sit in our humanity.  Acceptance.

The children need mercy too.  It is unmerited.  The children didn’t earn it.  Safety is created when children know we care about them despite their mistakes and poor choices.  It looks different from the standard school, stuck in behaviours, consequences, and comparisons.

Don’t get me wrong, the community requires policy and consequences.  It requires mercy in a greater dose.  Hopefully all of the children in my community experienced mercy this week.

We need to review the discipline policy, train the teachers, empower the students with great social-emotional learning. However, tolerating the big emotions of the up-and-down path of learning is with mercy: giving goodness whether they earned it or not. Haven’t others been merciful with me?  I’m pretty sure The Builder is merciful with me most days.

A Learn Forward community works to give goodness…always…even amidst setting and holding boundaries.  We can choose it.  It is merciful.  Coming to sit at the Table of Learning is an act of mercy.

Sharon Salzberg quotes a Hindu teacher in her On Being column,

The grace of God is coming down upon us all the time, like a gentle rain, but we forget to cup our hands.

For an experience of goodness, cup your hands, and it will rain down onto you.

Last week I wrote about creating Table of Learning experiences at our school.  The Table of Learning requires mercy.  Describe what that looks like.  How can we gather our child and mercifully fill his cup today, so he is ready to face the world?

For the sake of the children,

Karine