Bringing God’s message of peace into the classroom

For a brief, happy spell, I had a tutoring job at our public elementary school down the road. Reading, writing and doing math with 20 third graders, I could bore my ideas into their little sponge minds. Even after a statewide funding cut eliminated the tutoring program, the regular teacher let me come back to help out.

We’d read a pair of stories I’d brought from home. In the one, Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker social reformer in England in the early 1900s, returns one evening to her upstairs room at the inn where she’s staying and stops short in the doorway. Something is wrong. Her candle has gotten knocked to the floor. A dresser drawer is hanging open. Then she spots a man’s boot protruding from underneath her bed.

Elizabeth takes time to collect her wits. She then moves to the bed, kneels down beside the boot and starts praying out loud for the thief.

The man who crawls out is ragged and undernourished. He’s terrified that Elizabeth will call the police and he’ll get sent back to jail. Instead, Elizabeth gives him her husband’s sweater. She takes him down to supper. She gets him to divulge his seamy past. Together, she and he talk about how he might find a job.

In the other story, set in 1700s Switzerland, old Preacher Peter wakens in the night to noises on his roof. He steals outside to discover men tearing down his thatch. Realizing these are some of the village folks who’ve been angered by his church’s opposition to war, Peter goes back inside and asks his wife to fix the workmen supper.

He invites the men in, gets them around the table, offers a prayer. But they can’t eat the food on their plates. They push back their chairs and flee the room. Soon they’re back on Peter’s roof, repairing it. Then away they sneak, into the night.

Obviously, with these stories I meant to plant otherworldly notions. As I pointed out to the children, neither of our heroes had a gun stashed under the pillow. To clinch things, I announced that anybody who memorized—repeated to me—the bumper-sticker slogan on my car would be allowed to pick a prize out of my junk box.

Due to the layout of the parking lot, I couldn’t park close enough to my classroom. The distance made the words too hard to decipher. So I had to haul my husband’s binoculars to school. And because the above-the-radiator window sat too high for some of the children, they resorted to climbing a chair to peer out.

Perched on her knees atop the radiator, the back pockets of her jeans ablaze with silver-studded bows, tiny, fluffy-haired Sadie tried to hold the binoculars steady. “When Jesus, said—” Those first words were readable. “When Jesus said, ‘Love, your—'” But that next word was a stickler. It was too drawn-out and blurry. It took pained squinting.
I had the children copy down the line on scrap paper. They had to do the quotation marks. They had to spell properly. “When J-e-s-u-s said …”

Benny (not his real name) didn’t need a chair, though. He was the one I really wanted to get to. Sleepy eyed, camouflage jacketed, in love with maps and historical facts, he’d told me about his plans to join the military. Sometimes in class (we’d be working on, say, his times sixes: 6 x 6=36, 7 x 6=42, 8 x 6=48), he collapsed into hopelessness. “I can’t do it, I can’t get it,” he groaned.

On one occasion I got him to yell out to the parking lot, “I can’t do it, I can’t get it, I’m stupid.” Now the useless thoughts were gone from his head. They’d flown out the window. He seemed tickled—temporarily.

Benny’s choice of junk prize, after he memorized the bumper-sticker quote, was the stuffed tiger, or maybe it was a leopard. “When Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies,’ “recited Benny, concentrating hard, “I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”

Another child picked out the zebra (or panda—whatever). Konner took off with an old tie of my husband’s. Katlyn chose a tie, too. The plastic lizards went, and the turtles. The fake candle. The poker cards. The clock. The jump rope. Ethan went for the scuffed knee guards. He sauntered off to his next class with the purple Velcro straps wound around his pant legs.

You may be wondering why I never got into trouble. Actually, teachers in the public school system are expected to promote diversity. So if children aren’t learning about minorities who hew to odd convictions, that’s an omission in need of rectifying.

When I taught at the high school I showed the movie Gandhi. I had my juniors and seniors in English class watch a selection from Soldiers Speak Out, about the antiwar movement within the U.S. military. Maybe some of the poetry and other literature-textbook selections I’d taught earlier in the semester—the potent, raw evocations of war’s hideousness—had created in my students’ minds revulsion enough to validate the conscientious-objector mind-set. Think John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Think “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell (www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/gunner/gunner.html). Think “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen (www.rjgeib.com/heroes/owen/owen.html).

At the high school, U.S. Army recruiters are permitted to set up their displays near the gym or cafeteria, in the hall. They can’t sign up students on school property, but they can pal around with the kids and spin alluring stories about travel and adventure.

Occasionally they even bring their monstrous, jazzily painted tractor trailer and leave it like a brown steel death trap at the far edge of the lot designated for student cars.

One week, my husband says, the principal’s voice came over the intercom announcing that teachers, if they wanted, could take their classes out to the truck in the parking lot to see the weapons simulators. “May we go?” asked the ninth graders in my husband’s class. “Absolutely not,” he yelped. “We need fewer people wanting to kill, not more.”

The students, he says, shushed up fast. (To learn more about these specially outfitted semis, go here: http://www.usarec.army.mil/MSBn/Documents/MSBN_USER_Guide.pdf)

A third story I took to the elementary school for my third graders, Roald Dahl’s The Magic Finger, wasn’t expressly Christian or about loving your enemies exactly. The girl puts a curse on the family next door, avid hunters, when they come trooping joyously home with another deer carcass tied upside down by the hooves. She hates how they kill for the fun of it.

So when they go out hunting again and mow down 16 ducks, the curse kicks in. Four more ducks fly over—but the shooters keep missing. Weird.

Next morning the family members wake up to discover they’ve shrunk.They’ve grown duck wings in place of arms. The family flaps out the window and into the sky, and four oversized ducks with arms instead of wings move into the house. The family spends the day building a nest in a high tree, where they huddle miserably the whole livelong night.

In the morning, they find themselves staring down into the barrels of their own guns. No, no, the people screech, don’t shoot. Why not? ask the ducks. Weren’t you always shooting at us?

You’ll have to find out for yourself what happens next. I assure you, the third graders writhed in excitement. They got it—the unimpeachable logic. Even if Jesus never said anything about loving ducks, not shooting makes sense—not bringing down our enemies by harming them. Schoolchildren need to know this. I can’t be reminded often enough. Some stories more than others tell the truth.

Shirley Kurtz is a member of Pinto (Md.) Mennonite Church and author of a novel, Sticking Points (shirleykurtzbooks. blogspot.com).