On Stage and at School, Valentine’s Twists
The human heart is a wild and mysterious force, no less so for beating in the breast of a 10-year-old boy. When Chris Montoya sees little Erica Villaflores across the playground at Allesandro Elementary School, the yearning rises in his chest like a bright red balloon that cannot be held down, even with both hands.
Erica, and only Erica, is what he thinks of when he thinks of Valentine’s Day. But what his soul has to say to her cannot be expressed via the heaps of valentines he would like to give her in class today.
This is because when the teachers at Allesandro Elementary think of Valentine’s Day, they think back 30 or so years to when they were kids.
They remember the indescribable thrill as, one by one, people slipped their valentines into the doily-decked box on the teacher’s desk. They remember the eternity it took her to hand each one out. And they remember the letdown as, inevitably, the tally began: Who got the most valentines? How were they signed? Did anyone, like Charlie Brown, get left out?
It has been a generation, but the lesson is as indelible as it is bittersweet: Love can be quantified, and it hurts to come up short.
“I remember it being a popularity contest,” said fifth-grade teacher Carolyn Naylor, who has taught for the last 21 years at the little school near Dodger Stadium. “So that’s what I try to keep away from.”
Now, like most teachers, Naylor has instituted an enlightened valentine protocol: Kids who bring valentines must bring an equal number for every kid in the class so that nobody feels left out. It may sound overprotective, Naylor acknowledges, but it could be worse: Some schools no longer observe the holiday at all.
Welcome to classroom Valentine’s Day 1997, a fairer but perhaps less romantic time than you may recall.
“Anything that would be a detriment to a child’s self-esteem is being considered more deeply now,” said Barbara Strayer, a learning specialist at Ocean View Elementary School in Whittier. “It’s become the same in sports, where you used to pick teams so that there would be the last two kids standing there. You don’t see that much anymore.”
Thus the thrill of being singled out by that special someone may be duller than it once was, but so is the sting of not being singled out at all.
In the schoolroom, this has manifested itself in a broad range of Valentine’s Day restrictions that have taken shape since the 1970s, all aimed at softening the harsher facets of love.
Some teachers urge kids to bring a requisite number of generic valentines in unmarked envelopes to hand out to classmates randomly. “Please Do Not put whom the valentine is to,” instructed a note to first-grade parents at Eagle Rock Elementary School. “Just have your child sign his/her name on the back so the recipient knows who it is from.”
Other teachers have students draw names and exchange personalized, hand-made valentines, one-on-one. Still others have forgone valentine parties in an effort to un-hype the holiday.
Some non-Christian parochial schools ignore the holiday altogether because it technically celebrates a Christian saint. Other institutions have co-opted it, making its spirit an element of the curriculum.
At the private Sierra Canyon School in Chatsworth, for example, first-graders learn civics by bringing valentines to patients at the local veterans’ hospital. The overarching idea, says school psychologist Diane Bluett, is “to be inclusive, not exclusive. We like to say that every day is Valentine’s Day at Sierra Canyon.”
And if that takes some of the pizazz out of Feb. 14, experts say, it also helps keep schools out of the business of breaking hearts.
“There’s plenty of pain in the world as it is for kids. We don’t have to artificially contribute to it [in school],” said Don Fleming, a Beverly Hills psychotherapist and author of “How to Stop the Battle With Your Child.”
The ages between 6 and 11, Fleming said, are fraught with developmental issues about being included and excluded, and times like Valentine’s Day only aggravate kids’ stress.
And yet, “Valentine’s Day is hands-down their favorite day of the year,” said veteran Pasadena schoolteacher Patricia Johnson. “They love it more than Christmas, more than Easter, more than anything except maybe Halloween.”
At the Sierra Canyon school where Bluett works, for example, one little girl who asked that her name not be used said she has been looking forward to Valentine’s Day for months. See, there’s this little boy named Max, and she has such a crush on him that the other night she sat down at her kitchen table and wrote this poem:
Max is the one, the one for me/ He’s qiete and smart/ And dosen’t get in to fites/ He’s nice. And loves to read/ So thats why he’s the one for me.
To send him that poem would be unthinkably brazen, but she had a plan for Valentine’s Day: She was going to give him an ordinary-seeming card with an unmistakable message, such as “I’m wild about you.”
But then the teacher sent home a note telling parents that classroom valentines were to be simply signed by the giver and handed out randomly.
Star-crossed, the little girl came up with a backup plan: Today, she will send all of her valentines as if each were for Max. Each will bear his favorite cartoon character. Each will bear words of love. One of them, she figures will end up on Max’s desk. It’s a can’t-miss strategy, her mother laughed.
In public school classrooms like those at Allesandro Elementary, however, the strategies for circumventing the equal-valentine rule have become as complex as Victorian etiquette.
Under the modern protocol, kids say, the number of cards you get is less relevant than how fancy they are, and whether there are candies or stickers or special notes inside. Was the card a little one or a big one? Did it have spangles or was it plain?
Fifth-grader Daisy Salazar has bought a special sticker to put on the Sailor Moon valentine she will give to a classmate named Joe. She knows the teacher would like her to treat everyone equally, and insists she only likes this Joe “as a friend,” but she will nonetheless also enclose a picture of herself in the envelope she gives him today.
For her classmate, Chris Montoya, however, things will not be so simple, in part because it seems everyone on the playground except Erica knows how he feels. To try slipping her a candy-packed valentine would be so obvious, he’d never live it down, he said. So he has chosen to face this holiday like a man.
“I’m going to tell her face to face,” he said defiantly, as his buddies jostled and jeered.
“When you gonna tell her?” one little boy taunted.
“No sabes cuando!” another challenged. You don’t know!
“Do so,” he announced. “After school, we have a dance in the cafeteria. And then I’ll just walk up to her, and I’ll say, ‘Hey, Erica. Do you want to be my valentine?’ ”
The playground erupted in hysterical laughter. “Come on!” Chris’ best friend called, rolling his eyes. “Let’s play ball!”
* ISN’T IT ROMANTIC? The title of the new book “50 Most Romantic Things That Ever Happened” says it all. E1
