Just under a year ago, I sat in my weeklong training for the Arkansas Declaration of Learning. We were asked to select an issue affecting our students. My gut led me to the issue of resilience "when change chooses you." Throughout the year, we examined historical artifacts, artworks, and literary examples of resilience and grit. We built up our emotional vocabulary to express ourselves, learned how to find safe spaces, and armed ourselves with strategies to use when bad days become bad weeks or months or even years. The students were deemed official "Resilience Rangers" who both knew how to be resilient and how to help others wanting to do the same.
How could I ever have known what my sweet students would have to face?
The day the quarantine was announced, we'd spent the day doing theater exercises exploring the idea of fear of the unknown. We also worked on journals to give out to children that find themselves in situations where they have no choice but to be resilient. We continued to make progress on our scripts of realistic scenes with multiple possible endings that we'd planned to perform at schools throughout the North Little Rock School District. At the end of that day, they left my classroom for the last time as my students.
The journals still sit in my classroom, unfinished. The guiding question "How do we prepare ourselves for unexpected changes?" remains on the whiteboard. The scripts, however, have found new life on this page.
We've created this website that compiles some of our favorite and most valuable information from our year of discussing resilience on a daily basis. The scripts are now interactive comics where you can read the stories and choose from a selection of helpful strategies inspired by the Army Reserve's Master Resilience Skills. The students have also added autobiographical stories from during their time in a pandemic. It is my hope that this can be a living website that continues to grow.
While we no longer have the built-in audience of a live performance, we do have the possibility for a wider impact. Please consider sharing this website with anyone you feel might be helped by seeing realistic resilience strategies in action. While the featured characters are approximately 10 years old, these strategies are ones that can help all of us. None of these situations are ones in which we have the power to make the problem go away. But, dear friends, that does not mean we have no control.
Change has certainly chosen us. I am so beyond grateful that I can know I dedicated my whole heart and soul this year to empowering this set of incredible 4th graders to be resilient. The people they are becoming right now are infinitely more impactful than a virus.
