Honor

12.08.09 By Kellyanne Mahoney

Thud! Thud! Thud! Namir was pounding vociferously on his desk. Soon about a dozen other students were imitating him in a thunderous cacophony.

This is not the beginning of some teacher’s nightmare, but rather the opposite. The Honorable Judge Namir, or so I have been calling him since we began our first official classroom debate this week, was actually onto something really brilliant. You see he was having trouble hearing the cross examiners’ arguments because they had begun talking over each other as the argument took on a more heated pitch. And so he devised an imaginary gavel meant to bring order to the room. The other “judges,” stunned at first and probably equally annoyed at missing the juicy details of the debate they were transcribing into their notebooks, noticed the effect and emulated him. Because this worked so well, I, of course, stole his idea and instructed my other teams of judges all day that this was one of their very many vital responsibilities in imparting “a sense of justice and decorum” to the proceedings.

It delights me when my students show how emboldened they can be in owning their education.

I would like to tell of all the vigorous questions, rebuttals and even ad hominem attacks that took place today—but, to be quite honest, I often have almost no idea what my students are talking about during these cross examinations. They are really hard to follow. Seventh grade logic does exist, but bears little resemblance to adult logic, at least from my observations. I think today I was also so distracted by their quickness, their rhetoric, their charm, and their strange sense of pageantry—for example, some teams of “lawyers” in the middle-school cosmology apparently wear matching neckties and fedoras for big days in court. I do pay keen attention, but sometimes it sounds to me like the mwuh mwuh mwuh sound of adults in the Peanuts cartoons.

Therefore I anxiously await to hear the judges’ decision statements on Thursday after tomorrow’s closing arguments. In the meantime I will try not to forget what an honor it is to work with such an incredible group of kids—I doubt there are many professions where one can be so consistently humbled and elated at the same time.