High School P.E. Yoga

Last week my work took me out to the small high school in St. Paul. A rural school set in the midst of the fertile agricultural lands of the mid-Willamette Valley.  The landscape is flat as a pancake, and a patchwork of orchards, hop fields, nurseries, afalfa, strawberries and the people who work and harvest these crops.

My assignment was 2 mornings as the middle school P.E. teacher. P.E. was never my favorite gig, as my field is English Ed., but after taking roll, when the class was supposed to spend 5 minutes on warm-ups, my mouth suddenly opened to say "I'm a yoga teacher, and anyone who wants to do yoga stretches instead of laps come over here to this corner."
Substitute teaching is very much improv, and here I was winging it... not sure what would occur, given the large class including a number of boisterous 12 and 13 year old boys.
At the mention of the word 'yoga' several of the girl's eyes lit up, they smiled and I could hear a small chorus of "All right! I LOVE yoga. Oh this is so cool!"
As I began I was thinking, "OK I hope this isn't crazy!"
Fully half the class came into my corner... even a few boys showed up, and almost all of the girls. Most were watching me intently as I quickly scanned my brain for anything we could do with shoes on, no mats, and me having to have one eye out on the rest of the class, none of whose names or behaviors I knew yet.

We did a few stretches and combinations of tree pose balances. The kids were fabulous and sweet. The usual adolescent "everything is stupid" attitude was not on display. What a small joy. No, not small, it was a revelation. One of the biggest obstacles in education is that ennui against enthusiasm. This very thing has kept me from wanting to be in large classrooms. Today, however, I saw a glimmer of what could be.
One girl, Rachel, the angel of my day, (there is usually one) came up after class, looked me straight in the eye and said, "Thank you for teaching us yoga today." My heart melted. That is what I took home with me, after 4 hours of listening to basketballs and shouts reverberate inside gym walls, and the constant supervision of packs of wild, unconscious boys. (I later learned that some of them had urinated into the soap dispensers in the boys locker room.)
It was a 2 morning gig, and on the following day the principal joined me for the last class. The activity of the day was weightlifting. There wasn't a good venue for yoga stretches, and it felt harder to fit them in, so I accepted the routine. One of the comments the principal made after class, a wonderful teacher by the way, was that kids this age are very 'body unaware'. So true, and true for many adults too.

I can't help thinking how wonderful it would be to offer yoga to school kids, to give them early opportunities to learn focus through body awareness. There are some schools who offer yoga, and I hope it will become a trend. It could be part of the evolutionary change we need to make to continue our survival as this complicated species with a the big brain which often isn't our best quality.

Working with middle school age kids is giving me hope, actually. I believe they will find new holistic ways to see the world and to live. They will have to, and maybe on some level most know this, even if popular culture tells us otherwise.