Alliance for Catholic Education
It might be crazy to admit that one of my objectives on Fridays is to get my students to cry, but it isn’t because I am giving an impossible test or assigning a sisyphean task. I want them to shed a tear of joy, empathy, or compassion.
There’s a lot of idealized thoughts that go into any teacher’s lesson plans. The likelihood of everything happening exactly as planned, though, is not a guarantee.
There is one thing, though, that stays consistent in my middle school social studies classroom: “Feel Good Fridays.”
Each Friday, in a form of reflective prayer, my students come in, take out their paper for Feel Good Friday, and prepare to watch a two-minute clip from CBS’s series On the Road. Each week, they produce a story that showcases real instances of empathy, kindness, acceptance, and overcoming adversity.
In Brownsville, Texas, my middle schoolers are not used to seeing people that have many different life experiences from them. That is a fact probably true about most middle-schoolers, but since we live in a pretty homogenous area, there aren’t a lot of diverse experiences in our community. Telling them about my own life experiences, like explaining how people have to scrape snow off their cars during the winter, shocks and horrifies my teenagers. So, I take five minutes each Friday to broaden their worldviews, one “Feel Good Friday” lesson at a time.
One of my all-time favorite segments tells the story of a Texas high schooler, Gerald, who joins his school swim team without knowing how to swim. By the end of his senior year, his performance in the relay at their qualifier sends his team to the state meet. For me, it is just as important to show my students stories of pure inspiration as it is to show them how I resonate and connect with them emotionally, even if it means I admit getting teary-eyed.
As we watch our clips each week, I challenge students to journal in a way that will make them think about their own lives. Last week, I showed a clip where a local police officer helped a woman experiencing homelessness find a permanent place to live. Then, they were prompted to journal about how they wanted to give back once they become adults. Their responses were inspiring. I heard things like “give back to Guadalupe," "retire my parents," and “donate money to my church.”
In a time where people are increasingly self-interested, it is our mission as Catholic school teachers to promote a sense of community in our classrooms, but also within our schools, churches, families, and cities. Finding connection in spite of an isolated world is going to be a lifelong gift.