When you work in a kind-of-tough middle school, you quickly realize just how important kindness is, but also just how hard it is to teach. Last year, my main focus (yes, above helping students improve their academic skills) was "If you change nothing, nothing changes." It paid off, but a lot of my students either moved to new schools or graduated and moved on to high school, so I've had to start over this year. Many of the kiddos with whom I currently work are dealing with significant trauma and/or are largely indifferent to their surroundings (seemingly because of the trauma, because they are teenagers, and/or because this is just kind of the way this generation is in this area). Due to this indifference, I changed my mantra to "I can't teach you how to be kind, but I can give you the opportunity to try being kind and you can decide how you feel about it."
Approaching kindness in this laissaiz-faire sort of way actually has increased buy-in with many of my more seemingly disinterested kiddos. I've got a few of them totally hooked on playing on freerice.com, and in the school-wide food drive that I decided to run for November, my class was able to collect 150 items even though a handful of students in my class benefit from the same food drive we to which we were donating.
And then, there are other ways that I like to try and get the kids clued in to kindness. One of these ways is through fashion. My students know that I write a sustainable lifestyle blog, though I haven't shared the address or social media handles with them. Many of the girls, especially, are shocked when I tell them that I don't shop at places like Wal-Mart because it's hard to verify the origins of the products sold there. This "Default to Kindness" sweatshirt from Cultivated Fashion definitely made waves at school.
I strategically wore it during the last week of school before Thanksgiving, so the concept of kindness was on everyone's minds. I was lucky to encounter several curious minds who wanted to know more about my sweatshirt and I was ever-so-pleased to tell them that it was screen printed by a woman named K.Radhika in India. I know this, because she has signed her name on the tag inside the sweatshirt. I also know that this sweatshirt was made from all-natural and organic fibers and that the whole garment was assembled in a fair trade setting.
... and actually, everything from Cultivated Fashion is made this way, because owner and sustainable lifestyle podcaster Kara committed herself to shopping this way in 2016 (much the way I did around the same time) and she wants to share this way of life with the world. All of the garments she's designed are created with organic fibers and are produced by recovering men and women in a fair trade setting.
I like to think that the more conversations that we have, especially those conversations with the young humans who will be running the world in the next few decades, are just what we need to have in order to create a friendlier and more intentional world.
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