Why else would a tough middle-school boy want to do yoga?

A student of mine is the poster child for “at risk youth”.  He is the playground bully threatening to beat up everyone up who crosses his short fused temper.  He is the anarchist rejecting all authority of his teachers.  He is the forced participant of summer school programming just so that he can make it to the 9^th grade and not dropout.
  He is the kid who has walls built up so high that most find them to be impenetrable.  But behind all that perpetually labels him as an “at-risk youth”, he is still just a kid.

My personal philosophy about education and working with kids stems from what educational philosopher and reformist Jonathan Kozol says about teaching:

“Establishing a chemistry of trust between the children and ourselves is a great deal more important than to charge into the next three chatterers of the… packaged reading system we have been provided: the same one that was used without success by previous instructors and to which the children are anesthetized now.”

Establishing genuine relationships and connection to your students is key.

One of my biggest challenges that I am facing this summer, is how do you build these genuine relationships with the kids who want nothing to do with you?

This particular student was one of these kids. He never looked me in the eye when I said good morning, always walked away every time I started up a conversation with him on the playground, and neglected to follow any of my directions during our afternoon activities.  The connection was not there nor did it look like it would ever be.

This weekend things changed when I saw him outside of the school context.  I walked into a restaurant where I saw was working behind the counter helping an elderly gentleman place an order. He was far friendly, kinder, and more personable than I ever would have expected him to be.  No one would ever have guessed that the burdensome structural label of “at-risk” had ever been placed on him. At school it seems like he has a need to be defiant and fulfill all that comes with being “at-risk”, but in the real world he just gets to be himself.   I approached the counter and asked how he was doing and for the first time he looked me in the eye and said “good.”

That next day on the playground, as the kids googled different yoga poses on their smart phones and I barely succeeded in recreating them, he came over and stared trying the yoga poses with me.  I wasn’t very good at them and neither was he, but I could tell that he was enjoying himself.  Why else would a tough middle-school boy want to do yoga?  The beginnings of a connection are there, however small they be.

Now he still acts like the toughest kid on the block around me, but at least I got to see little glimpses of the real him, the good kid that’s hiding behind all of those walls.  Social Change can happen on the smallest of levels and it begins with connections like these.