Kids Helping Kids

When I was in the sixth grade, I had a Social Studies teacher named Ms. Taylor.

As teachers and my eleven year old preferences went, I was pretty neutral on her. She wasn’t especially mean or especially nice. I generally thought she was a good teacher, but not the kind who blew my mind with the information she shared or the way she delivered it.

But then there came a very strange day of class.

Whereas most days were spent discussing history, government, maybe a bit of geography, that morning the conversation turned more distinctly to civic responsibility. I don’t remember how each segue led to the next, only that by the end of the forty minute period, we were discussing what we--not as an abstract society, but as the actual people in the room--could do to help those less fortunate and give back to our community.

I wasn’t necessarily energized by the idea. I was equal parts skeptical at the impact we could make and a lazy adolescent. Nonetheless, the class session stuck with me for how far off the beaten path it had gone, and how I wasn’t sure if this were a mark against Ms. Taylor’s command of the classroom, or an endorsement of her flexibility in helping students chase knowledge that she’d abandoned whatever she originally had planned in favor of this discussion.

The discussion didn’t end with class. It didn’t end with our particular class, either.

My memory is sketchy, but I know Ms. Taylor taught at least one, and probably two or three other sections of the same class, and I recall anecdotally gathering that each one of the classes had pursued similar tangents that day, each arriving at the seemingly out-of-the-blue idea of a fundraising event for charity.

Even through my eleven-year-old lens, I understood that this was not coincidence or a moment when the zeitgeist took hold of every one of Ms. Taylor’s classes. At its most intellectually honest, the idea had emerged organically in the first class she taught that day (I think it was mine, though maybe part of her skill in steering the class discussion was that each class would, in retrospect, think they must have been first). More realistically, Ms. Taylor hatched a plan to raise money for Operation Sunshine--a charity that send underprivileged kids to summer camp--and contrived how she might steer her students into taking ownership. Because wouldn’t we be more committed--and dare I say learn more--if we thought the idea was our own? All that, and weren’t the optics of children supporting other children (Kids Helping Kids, as the day of service would officially become known) the better story?

The event was a success on whatever terms it had set for itself at the time. I remember local TV news crews visiting—and seeing Ms. Taylor on the 6 o’clock news extolling her students who had come up with all of the ideas for the events themselves. The day raised substantial money through a car wash, a can and bottle drive, a bake sale, probably a dozen or so other activities, events, and endeavors converging on a singular Saturday outside the middle school. It became an annual happening for sometime--I couldn’t find much record of it, but for all I know, maybe it still is?

I’m not sure what got me thinking about Ms. Taylor or Kids Helping Kids. I think something had always stuck in my craw about the intellectual dishonesty of Ms. Taylor contriving her plan and foisting it on students. But then, across a distance of decades, some of that indignation falls away. Can I really fault a teacher who wanted to help a community charity? Is it bad that she mobilized a whole class of sixth graders, even if she fictionalized some of how the effort came together?

So it is that, as an adult, I forgive Ms. Taylor. In reflecting on adults whose choices offended or angered me as a kid, as an adolescent, as a teenager, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt now that, where the actions or intents weren’t obviously mean-spirited, they were probably doing the best they knew how with the resources and experience available to them, just like I like to think I am now, most days.

Boiled down to its essentials: organizing an event to help kids, and charging other (generally more privileged) kids with the responsibility of doing the work? That’s not so bad as a legacy.