If you can't meditate with 5th graders, you can't meditate

I asked my class of fifth graders to take a picture of their favorite teacher last week. This morning I asked them to draw their favorite teacher, from the photograph, upside down. It's an exercise Betty Edwards recommends in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, helps to turn down the impulses of the left brain for categorizing and judging and favor the right brain's spatial expertise. I know what I asked them to do was challenging, it's hard for me too. Then I asked them to be silent (also not always easy for me). The silence bit was very hit and miss for the first class, mostly good for the second. I remember seeing a guy on tv lording over his qi gong class once, not creating a calm safe space at all but getting agitated with students that weren't doing it his way. His face popped into my head during my first class and I'm glad it did because I was close to wringing their little necks. You're drawings are really coming along, now shut up! It was as if they were physically incapable of allowing eachother to work without constant judgement. "Oh my gawd, that looks so weird!" They're battling so many things right now, I must remember compassion: being 12 yrs old, the weather getting more and more beautiful, elementary school almost over, being 12yrs old... I remembered talking about girls this age during the Awakening The Dreamer workshop and saying how we've really got to reach those girls and awaken them to their immense creative potential. So why not start with the girls in front of me? Because they can really get under my skin, damnit. I hate, hate, hate jokes at my expense- in middle school it made me feel uncool, now it makes me feel old (same thing I guess). And I get it, they're trying any way they can to make sure they're the cool ones, that they are OK in the eyes of those judging them, but it still gets under my skin. I lectured them about respect at the end of class, tried to tie it in with Earth day and how we have to share to planet, and that it begins with respect. If I'm honest, part of it was to reassert my control in class, but I did try to approach it from a global community perspective and try to make the point that we all want to be treated with respect and we're all capable of giving it. So I don't think they saw me boiling under the surface. We'll both try again next week.
Happy Earth Day