What They're Interested In

In 2001 I began teaching a single 45-minute class on stress reduction as part of the health unit in Freshman Studies, an ungraded one-semester course required of all ninth graders. I based my class on mindfulness. Although Sidwell Friends was a high-stress environment for many, I suspected it wouldn’t be easy to engage groups of 13- and 14-year-olds. In his book Teacher Man, ¹³ author Frank McCourt wrote about connecting with his unmotivated New York City high school English class. “What is it they’re interested in?” he asked himself. The answers were immediate: sex and food. He introduced a hugely successful unit in which students collected and recited family recipes, some with musical accompaniment provided by classmates. My classes wouldn’t be as challenging as McCourt’s. However, asking kids to attend fully to anything with nonjudgmental awareness and an attitude of curiosity was asking them to care. Extending care requires a vulnerability some resist. To care involves taking a risk in the face of possible scoffing and ridicule in the ever-judgmental peer atmosphere. I carefully selected what I asked my students to focus on, considering McCourt’s question “What interests them?” At their age young people were figuring out who they were. They had great interest in themselves, their peers, and their bodies. For these students, the mind was a fresh frontier. Inviting them to observe their mental activity when their minds were “at rest” became the basis of my exercise, “Mind as a Stage.”