We are electric beings, wired and charged. Nowhere is this more evident than when a sixth grade boy is required to hold the hand of a sixth grade girl. The result is electrifying.
In my classroom, we open the day with a series of theater exercises, the intent being to focus the room, transitioning from activities outside (typically involving some variation of running, kicking, chasing, being chased, laughing), to the quiet focus expected inside. The exercises include a few stretches, and a few movement routines, requiring that students follow my lead.
We close by joining hands and sending a pulse -- receiving and sending a squeeze of hands -- around the group, first in one direction, then the other, then three times around, transmitting the pulse as quickly as possible.
The quality with which the class transfers the pulse is a good indicator of the group's collective focus. Some mornings the pulse is sluggish, moving in fits and starts, or fails to make it around at all. Other mornings it's electric, as if the pulse is thrown rather than passed, almost magical.
The holding of hands in a circle is a challenge. Boys tend to gravitate to the east, girls to the west, with Mr. Spedding on the north end. That south end is where the action is. The girls tend to be settled, prepared to extend a hand. The boy's end, on the other hand, tends to dance around like a free live electrical line sparking wildly in an intersection, with jeers and cackles and hoots, reminiscent of a Discovery Channel program on chimpanzees threatened by a predator.
Ah, to be eleven and twelve! I'm pleased to be observing them with an additional forty years of life experience.
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