Ripple Effect

 I haven’t written in a while and I apologize! There have been great changes in my life and I’m happily busy.  Among the biggest change is that I became a 6^th grade teacher to 79 students. Woohoo!

I always wanted to mix my love for pit bulls with my love for teaching, but I also was very aware of the fact that there are deadlines to meet, goals to be reached and tests to be taken and there’s little time for small talk in the classroom. My dilemma was that every time I would try to answer a question or relate something they said to my life, I found that I was fumbling to find something that didn’t involve pits or rescue.  When I realized that it was near impossible to show my students who I was without telling them about my dogs, I found a happy medium.  

For the last three-ish weeks, my students have been greeted each morning by a picture of a foster dog with their daily warm up:

“Bindi says “GOOD MORNING!” Don’t forget to get all your materials prepared for class!”

The students began inquiring about the foster dog’s pasts and what part I played in their lives. For the first week, they were still considered “pit bulls” and their questions centered around, “Have you ever been bitten?” or “Isn’t it scary?” But in the second week, they came to rely on one of my foster dogs greeting them in class and telling them about their daily warm up.  The chorus of inflected “Awwwww!”s made me grin, but what I didn’t know was that it’d get better. Much better.

Third week – no more new foster dogs.   One a day doesn’t go very far when we’ve only had 8 fosters.  So the warm up returned to Microsoft Word 2007, white background, black text – red or purple if I was feeling adventurous.  The kids were visibly disappointed. 

“You don’t have a dog for us today? Well, can you just tell us a story about one of them? Please?”

Woah. Wait a second. Dog? I was right - my students had made the jump. They had done what almost no adult can do.  Change their perception.  They had successfully advanced their thinking from, “Ms. Markwis’s pit bulls” to “Ms. Markwis’s dogs”.  All of my fosters had become just plain ol’ dogs to them – dogs that chew, bark, play and every now and then, drag Ms. Markwis into the greenway swamp (thanks Sage!).

I would have been thrilled for this to be the end of my story.   But it’s not. The final piece of the puzzle happened today and a smile was plastered on my face for the remainder of the day because of it.  During D.E.A.R. time (Drop Everything And Read), a few of my students had not brought a book so I instructed them to read their literature book.  About 5 minutes in, I look up from my book to tell one of my students to stop talking.  He says, while holding up his book, “But Ms. Markwis – there’s a story in here about how pit bulls are bad”.  I felt every head swing in my direction waiting for my response.  Before I could even open my mouth, one of my other students breaks the thick silence and blurts out, “Can we rip out the page? We don’t want people reading that junk.”

Now – I don’t know what the article/story actually said, I need to go back and look at it.   But I realized that I had created a splash in the pool of my students and had formed a ripple effect in which these 70ish students (I’m not naïve enough to believe that I have a 100% success rate) now think of pit bulls for what they really are – dogs.  Even if a tenth of those students say one positive thing to one other person about pit bulls, that’s a definitive step in the right direction.  

And plus, anytime someone jumps on the bandwagon of your passion, it’s a good day.   It certainly WAS a “High Five Friday” today…