Classroom 209

“We can’t play hangman. We can’t!”

I stand in front of the whiteboard of my classroom at an underserved elementary school in South Bend, Indiana with four third graders looking at me intently. In my mind, I wonder why we can’t play hangman. Perhaps it's that they want to do more of our tutoring work - though I can’t understand why my kids would ever turn down a game.

“Hangman is about the lynching of people like us. We can play snowman instead!”

My heart pounds a little quicker and my cheeks grow red. I am the only white person in this room of intelligent minds and big hearts. My head is hot with embarrassment - how dare I. It makes so much sense - a man hanging from a short rope, suspended awaiting his death.

My cognitive structures are different from any of the kids who sit across the table from me enrolled in TutorND’s literacy program I work on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings and afternoons. They view school as a place of exploitation, fighting, and insecurity. The failures of our educational systems have impacted their personal perceptions of themselves and their future. Hailing from a sunny, small surf town in Southern California, my experiences of education and schooling were brightly colored. My aunt was my kindergarten teacher, I was reading chapter books by the beginning of first grade, I tested high and people believed in my abilities. School was safe, it was empowering, it was inclusive, and set the foundations for my understanding of our “world’s history” and my own life story.

Standing with all eyes on me in Room 209, I don’t know exactly how to respond to my sweet students. I offer my apologies and quickly write “snowman” in big, bolded letters atop the board. We play, and we pretend that didn’t just happen. But as I get into my car to leave and drive back into the bubble of Notre Dame, I can’t seem to shake what just happened. Our cognitive structures and mistranslation of moral attitudes had just shown themselves with flashing lights and exclamation points. With brains whose mental frameworks are formed early on and easily influenced by the information we are exposed to, education and transparency continue to be stand-out opportunities to increase young people’s understanding of our imperfect world and call to justice.

Brooke Gladstone’s piece on “The Trouble with Reality” explains some of the deeply integrated structures of cognition that are present in our decision-making and mental processes. Gladstone explains the idea of how reality is really subjective - a personal, distilled-down version of histories that we choose to subscribe to or not. When thinking about the schooling systems in America, it is hard to not see clearly how much cognition and development of the brain play a role in our perceptions and understanding of the world.

Hangman is a simple - yet effective - example. Attending a primarily white, upper-class private school in Orange County, California meant that my “world history” was skewed. We celebrated Columbus Day with grand feasts and costumes. We learned that slavery ended with the 13th Amendment - we learned that equal rights were instantly instilled and suffrage ended. We learned to praise historical figures whose truths were not as pretty as we believed. Most people like to keep their umwelt narrow, close to themselves and their beliefs, closing themselves off to the unbiased, sometimes hard-to-accept truths.

Moshman’s explanation of epistemic cognition directly correlates to the themes of childhood development and the careful shaping of moldable children's moral understandings. When do we begin to challenge our beliefs? Why? Is it met with encouragement or punishment? These questions matter. Answering the tough questions with honesty and humility allows people to formulate, challenge, or continue to build their own opinions. As Clark Power shared, giving the power of knowledge freely and encouraging exploration in youth is essential to developing minds that will seek out meaningful conversations about our Nation’s perils. Looking at a democratic setup in school allows students to emulate real-world conversations and experiences, gifting them with truth and the space to challenge their previously accepted ideas. Power’s point on giving children the agency to use their own critical thinking skills and begin to exercise the application of cognitive structures to important moral questions is one that is worthy of investigation. Are we telling students what is right and what is wrong, or are we offering them the framework and opportunity to find their own meaning in lessons? Knowledge is power, but power might just be influencing knowledge.

So, where do we go from here, Dr. Darryl Heller asks. I’d argue that we put ourselves in classrooms like 209. I’d argue that when a child calls you out for your own blindness, you meet them with gratitude. I’d argue that when discomfort knocks at our doors, we lean into it and experiment with the gift of challenging cognitive biases.

Here I sit, writing a paper for a class rooted in activism, justice, and acceptance, talking about the time I learned something from an underserved 3rd grader. These are moments we should strive to have. These are moments that will deeply rewire the sneaky accepted norms of my cognition and challenge me to be better, reminding me that even my “sophisticated” cognitive structures are always more malleable than we think.

And for the record, “snowman” turned out to be a lot more fun than hangman ever was.