An Invaluable Tool in Supplementing the Basic 3 Rs: Relating : Youngsters Dare to Get to the Heart of Matters With Fragile Eloquence
The first time the red velvet heart went around the circle of 30 fourth-graders, it may as well have been a hot potato. Nervous giggles erupted here and there as the soft, fuzzy heart flew from hand to hand.
Only the very bravest youngsters held on to it long enough to share their innermost thoughts--a privilege granted to the holder of the heart. When they did speak, it was in tiny, fragile voices, as if they had never been heard before.
When you were 10 years old, did people ever ask for your opinion on world peace, or how you were feeling at that very moment? If they did, did they listen with reverent attentiveness and respect, not daring to interrupt or laugh or tease you later?
These are the some of rules agreed upon by participants in a Heart Talk, and the children in Helen Steel’s classroom at Nestor Elementary School take them very seriously. They’ve been having Heart Talks every week since school started.
The exercise is part of a 10-lesson supplemental curriculum, “More Teachable Moments,” written by San Diegan Cliff Durfee to help teachers and students deal with what he calls “the fourth ‘R’ ”: Relating.
On this day, Durfee, his girlfriend and business partner Chris Traskos, Steel and a reporter are sitting in on the Heart Talk.
The first step is designed to set up a “safe” environment for sharing thoughts and feelings. At Durfee’s instruction, we joined hands, closed our eyes and visualized an energized ball of light/love passing up one arm and down the other, through each person sitting around the circle. Once we had been joined in this spirit of love, Durfee suggested a few topics for discussion.
The first were easy. “What are you going to be on Halloween?--or anything else you want to talk about.”
There were quite a few ghosts-to-be among the group. Then he asked some tough questions. “What would you do to make peace in the world, or in your family?”
“The way I could make peace on this planet is by letting people know about other people,” ventured one little girl.
Another spewed out the words as fast as she could, before 33 pairs of eyes had time to focus on her. The message was barely audible, but shatteringly important: “ . . . make peace in my family . . . is for my parents to stop fighting.”
” . . . by loving them, telling them not to fight no more,” agreed another.
On subsequent passes of the bean-bag heart with the rainbow ribbon across its middle, the students talked about what what they thought of Heart Talks and how they were feeling (“real shy” was a favorite response).
Quite a few never shared at all, except to whisper the mandatory “I don’t have anything to share right now.”
But according to Steel, who has used Heart Talks for several years, these are often the children who benefit most.
“Every year I’ve had some students, those who’ve never been listened to, those who have no self-image or self-confidence, (who) try and sabotage it. No one’s ever paid attention (to them). They don’t know how to act,” she said.
But students often come back to visit years later, she said. “The first thing they say, ‘Do you still have the Heart Talks?’ And some of them were the ones who tried to sabotage them the most, who absolutely couldn’t handle sharing themselves, but they got so much out of what everyone else shared that helped them.”
Her current class agrees.
“I wish people would share something instead of passing (the heart) on,” Frankie complained on one of his turns during the Heart Talk. “I could learn more about them,” he explained later.
“I like it because everybody expresses their feelings and then you get to learn a lot more about everybody,” agreed classmate Shannon. “I feel that if everybody gets to know things about you, you get along better.”
Allan confessed that he sometimes shares things when he’s holding the heart that he wouldn’t normally talk about, but Faustino said he hardly ever speaks up. He’s too shy, he said, but if he were a teacher he would definitely use Heart Talks in his classroom.
“Last year when I was in the other class, no one ever talked about what they thought or anything,” added Charlotte. “I don’t like to talk a whole lot; I like to listen to other people talking.” That makes it easier to speak up when it’s her turn, she said.
Durfee believes that learning cannot happen until the emotional ups and downs we all experience--children included--have been recognized and dealt with in an intelligent way.
“If you’ve ever had a situation where you’ve got blocked feelings--you’ve come off the freeway and you’re nervous or whatever, and then you sat down and you tried to do anything intelligently, you’d probably fail at it,” he said. “A lot of the kids have a lot of emotional things going on, too.
“Not that this is a psychological fix-all type of thing, but it allows people, the kids and the teacher, to communicate in a way that those feelings and things kind of release themselves, and then they’re ready for the teachable moment.”
He defines that too-rare moment as a time “when the whole person is vibrant with the desire to learn; when the heart and mind freely allow curiosity to soar beyond time and apparent limitation.”
Last spring, the South Bay Unified School District purchased 30 of the bright blue, red and yellow binders that hold Durfee’s “cookbook approach” to classroom exercises on listening, interrupting, outer and inner silence, judging others, understanding and taking responsibility for feelings, setting goals, supporting others, and translating the special quality of a Heart Talk for use at home, or anywhere, with anyone. The district asked Durfee, who earns his livelihood as a computer consultant, to give an in-service training session.
It certainly wasn’t the first time he had addressed a group of teachers since he published “More Teachable Moments” in 1983, but the workshop sessions still remind him of his own shyness, which he has had to overcome to promote the curriculum.
Durfee’s first book, “Feel Alive With Love, Have a Heart Talk,” was directed to adult couples. It stemmed from his discovery, after 13 years of working with computers, that he had been suppressing the “feeling” side of his personality, throwing his whole existence out of balance.
“More Teachable Moments” took three years to write. Durfee sold off his real estate investments to support his “labor of love,” and a dedicated crew of teacher volunteers field tested each lesson. In 1983, “More Teachable Moments” was finally published under the company name Live, Love, Laugh.
Word of the curriculum is spreading slowly, but enthusiastically, among teachers and administrators. It has been endorsed by humanist writer Carl R. Rogers and educational specialist Jack Canfield, and letters from teachers and students confirm their opinions.
One little girl stopped a family fight by passing the heart. According to the letters, Heart Talks have helped students deal with the death of a classmate, and reunited a warring faculty at a local private school.
“A Heart Talk opens you up like a rose on a spring morning,” wrote a fourth-grade boy. “It’s very soft and delicate. It’s like holding a very, very special rose that is the last of its beauty and kind. You can say what you feel and nobody will judge you. It is very special and I love it!”
The teachers seem to agree that taking time for “More Teachable Moments” makes it easier to teach “academic” subjects. Because they’ve come to know one another in a new way, the students lose their fear of speaking out.
Durfee--whose own child is in his 20s--is firmly committed to doing whatever he can to give classrooms more balance.
“The only thing that makes us different than computers is our feelings,” he said. “The things we have that computers don’t have are the things we don’t develop very well in the teaching environment, and that’s how to deal with our emotions and feelings, how to develop our intuition. Einstein said that all of his major discoveries came from, not his intellectual side, but his imagination and his intuitive side. Yet in the classroom we do very little (in the way) of developing that.
“In school I was taught to work alone. I was taught to remember facts and not to copy other people’s work. When I got out into industry, it was the total opposite.
“I needed to work with other people as a team. I didn’t need to remember facts as much, but what I did need to know was what I didn’t know, and where I could find that information. Once you’re out in industry . . . you build on other people’s work so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”
