Planning for Glimmers
School offers many opportunities for teachers to be “triggered.” The copy machine is down — again. A parent is upset about a grade because they don’t understand that “approaching proficiency” is exactly where a student SHOULD be in October. I haven’t checked a single item off of my mile-long to-do list all week. A behavior incident ate up my prep hour with meetings and referrals instead of grading. Ugh. The grading.
We hear a lot about “triggers,” those moments that activate our fight/flight/freeze response and can turn an okay day into a dumpster fire.
A few years ago, I learned a word for the opposite sensation. In her 2018 book, Deb Dana, a social worker, coined the word “glimmers.” While triggers bring negativity, glimmers are small moments that do the opposite, invoke joy, calm, or gratitude. They are “micro moments that begin to shape our system in very gentle ways.”
When I started this journey into sustainable teaching last July, I expected that sustainability would mostly be about removing tasks from my plate and avoiding triggering moments — or at least mitigating my negative reactions/responses to them.
What I’m learning is that most of the triggers I experience are out of my control. I can check email fewer times a day and I can batch my planning and copying to make the most of the planning time that I have, but I can’t control my students, their parents, or the copy machine.
And some of the best days that my students and I shared this year took me more work to pull off, not less. But it was all about glimmers.
For the first 8 weeks of school, my Creative Writing juniors and seniors had read, written, revised, and reflected upon poems. We talked about what moved us as readers and we noticed the techniques that writers use to convey their unique-yet-universal understandings of being human.
I often find the end of any curricular unit anticlimactic. We spend so much time writing and revising, we turn it in, and then…move on to something else while my students wait, anxiously for me to reduce their writing to a grade. (ugh.)
Students are often reluctant to share their writing, especially their poetry and especially with the isolation that comes from staring at the Chromebook screens that have been all-too-common since COVID. But I also know that through this sharing, we feel more connected and less alone.
While it’s ancient in “kid years,” I love Neil Pasricha’s (2013) TED talk, The 3 As of Awesome, to introduce students to the idea that we see what we look for. Look for bad things? They’re all over. You’ll find tons of them. Look for good things? Guess what? They’re there, too. And these glimmers are all around us.
Pasricha’s blog, 1000awesomethings.com, started in a dark place: amid a divorce, his close friend died by suicide. He remembers, “As these dark clouds were circling me and I was finding it really really difficult to think of anything good, I said to myself that I really needed a way to focus on the positive somehow.”
“I was trying to remind myself of those simple, universal pleasures that we all love we just don’t talk about.”
So, when my students entered the room on this particular last day of a poetry unit, anonymous poems written by their classmates were already spread around the room’s tables. We watched Pasricha’s TED talk and read a few of his “1000awesomething” entries before focusing on a small glimmer in our own lives for the class’s write-in.
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The bridge from appreciating small individual glimmers in our lives to seeing the good in our classmates’ writing was a natural one to cross.
I made this crossing more explicit with these remarks:
Today is about celebration. I have to offer “constructive criticism” and score you according the rubric, but you can all provide 100% appreciation and support to each other. Your job is to celebrate the ideas and creativity of your classmates.
Think of the time and effort that you’ve put into your poem’s drafting, revising, and reflecting. Give each of your peers the care and attention that you hope they’ll give your poem.
We will celebrate poems all hour.
The response format was a simple Google form with two questions:
(1) What is the title of the poem you are celebrating?
(2) Complete this template with specifics from your peer’s poem: When you wrote [ quote from the poem or describe what they did that was effective], I like the way you [what technique is effective here? what did the author do that worked? name it.]. This helped me understand [what meaning?] because [explain how that technique example helped create the author’s meaning].
(Admittedly, the set-up took more rushing and last-minute preparation than I’d prefer. Poems were due by midnight. The next morning, I came in early, printed each student’s poem without their name (and kept a title/name) record so I could send everyone an email of their positive feedback later. And I was careful to choose poems for each table so that students wouldn’t encounter their own poems and had those poems out on groups’ tables when the students arrived.)
But when the students began, it was all worth it. For an hour, cell phones rested in our class “cell hotel” and only one tab, our Celebration Google Form, was open on every Chromebook. We aimed to complete five poem responses in an hour, and many students traveled to other tables once they’d celebrated the five at their tables.
At the end, students felt good. They were impressed by their classmates’ writing and were eagerly awaiting their email of positive feedback.
One student, at the end of class, told me, “I bet you feel like the happiness fairy now, getting to send everyone their comments.”
And I did feel like the happiness fairy. The glimmer fairy.
I don’t know how long it will take me to sort and send celebration emails to all of my students, but I know that they (and I) are eagerly awaiting them.
I’m realizing that eliminating triggers isn’t possible. Fewer things to do would be nice. But joy is sustainable when you plan for glimmers.
