When I was a teenager, I had a terrible time dressing myself. Terrible taste. Tactile sensory defensiveness. A mom who couldn’t appreciate how important the color of your Levi’s tag was — it kind of had to be orange. Am I right? No, really, am I right? I could never keep up. Top it off with my severe ADHD, and you get a kid who couldn’t pay attention long enough to brush her teeth let alone blow-dry her hair into a swiss-roll of a face frame. And make-up . . . are you kidding me?
So, when I watched John Amaechi discuss identity on the Facing History & Ourselves website, I saw myself in my You Suit, an idea he speaks about, that describes how we try to fit in no matter how exhausting that effort might be, especially teen-aged people.
I, myself, still do this by beating everybody to the punch in understanding who I am. I tell people how odd I am, how disorganized I am, how dyslexic and ADD I am, how clumsy I am, how selfish I can be, how much of an old lady I am becoming, and so on. For many years, I’ve learned to cultivate a You Suit that tells people that I know how they see me, and I don’t want them to be uncomfortable for seeing me that way. I just never had the skills to cultivate a suit that actually helps me fit in. At my age, I kind of don’t have the desire either.
All that being said, I’m not sure my current You Suit is any more comfortable or helpful than my failed attempts at fitting myself into the one I needed if I wanted to be cool in high school. It’s just easier to maintain.
Was that a long digression, dressed in an Intro Suit? Good question.
What John Amaechi‘s talk made me think about though was how I can help students find the zippers of their You Suits and climb out of them in a once-a-week, two-hour Religious School class. This is the great puzzle I’ve wrestled with ever since I started teaching in the mid-90s. For students to feel safe enough to really open into growth and learning, they have to loosen their suits; and for a teacher to help them do that requires a culture of safety.
Building a culture of anything in a classroom requires time, repetition, room to test the hypothesis that the culture is reliable, and so on. Teachers spend consecutive days, if not weeks, building this culture, returning to enrich it throughout the year. I don’t have that kind of time. All I have, I think, is my personality and my reputation. That is often enough for some students because they see me for years before they arrive in my classroom; I have a big, outgoing, goofy personality; or they are younger siblings and they’ve heard about me. Also, our school tries to make our aspirations clear: We want young Jewish people to feel safe enough at our school to go on this spiritual adventure with us and come back enriched.
I’m thinking about building some sort of exercise for class that might help students loosen up their You Suits at will rather than just because I have used my own superpowers to coax them out. There is a classic exercise: the You Box, in which students decorate the outside of their box with things that represent what the outside world sees and the inside with what they hide or can’t show to the outside world. It’s a cool exercise, but most students do it in some other learning environment. And it’s not necessarily an active process; it doesn’t necessitate loosening the suit.
My first step will be to show the video to younger folks. A lot of my old students and other folks I knew when they were teenagers will be around for the holidays. I think I’ll start with them. I also think I’ll show the video to my current seventh graders and see what they have to say about it. I might just ask them to help me build an exercise for next year’s class.
I’ll report back, I imagine.
You could report back too. Watch the video (the link, above, will take you there) and tell me how it strikes you.