Runaway bunny decides to stay
“Teacher may I borrow it again?”
“Again? But Joaquin (name and details have been changed), don’t you want to borrow another book? I have lots of other books you may borrow.”
A thin, six by eight inch, 18-page book copyrighted by Harper and Row in 1942, “The Runaway Bunny” by Margaret Wise Brown was the only book Joaquin wanted to borrow. It’s old grungy cover belied the dramatic impact it made on the tempestuous seven year old boy. As he quietly went back to work, I wondered what happened to the boy who used to vehemently push his desk away from him in our daily battle of wills? Where was the boy whose brain used to have a sign that said “Closed”? Or even yet, “Go away”?
It was not until I learned about brain research that I understood what might have happened to the old Joaquin.
It has been said that the brain is like a computer which receives information from the outside. But I believe it is more like a telephone operator of bygone days, with a switchboard in front of her, out of which she pulls and inserts cords into various little holes to connect calls. The “calls” are information received through our senses – what we see, hear, taste, smell and touch. The “lines” are neurons where the information is passed along.
Imagine the limbic system in your brain as a network of phone lines. The amygdala is the center of the limbic system; it is a telephone operator that helps decides whether to accept or block “calls” or data coming in.. When the limbic system is overloaded with stress or negative emotions, it will “drop the calls,” or not pass on information received from the senses into memory.
“…positively reinforcing or intrinsically motivating stimuli unlock the gates of the limbic system to facilitate active information processing,” writes Judy Willis, M.D., in her book “Brain Friendly Strategies for the Inclusion Classroom: Insights from a Neurologist and Classroom Teacher.”
It is these pleasurable information that have the best chance of entering long term memory storage banks, states Willis.
Once information passes through the first filter, the information is coded into patterns that connect to existing pathways. Willis states that these pathways are activated through relational, emotional, personally relevant, learner-participating, experiential stimuli. And the more the stimuli is repeated, the stronger the pathway; it has less chance of being pruned. For a classroom teacher, this means learning happens best when the student is relaxed and unafraid. When the student can personally relate, experience or participate in a lesson, it becomes a part of long term memory and more easily recalled. Processing happens more smoothly.
At this stage synapses are firing away in the brain. Willis calls it the brain’s electrical dance of original, creative discovery, the “aha” moment.”
Joaquin had a difficult early childhood. He was left with stern relatives who provided adequately for his early care in an environment that was an emotional roller coaster. He was left there by struggling parents who gave him and his siblings up for a while to find work in another state. His parents finally got their act together, and brought Joaquin and his siblings home again. But Joaquin was an angry boy. He resented being left behind. As the authority figure in the classroom he identified me with the parents he thought abandoned him even if only briefly. He was scared of things falling apart again. His brain was overwhelmed with threats and fears. Not only was he dropping calls, he was smashing the switchboard to smithereens.
But one fateful day, I read “The Runaway Bunny.”
“I am running away,” said the runaway bunny. If you run away, said his mother, I will run after you. For you are my little bunny. The bunny said he will still run away and be a rock on a mountain. The mother said she would be a mountain climber and climb to where he was. The bunny said he will be all sorts of things – a crocus, a tree, a sailboat, etc. At each turn, the mother was going to be there to get him. For he was his mother’s little bunny. Shucks, he said. He might as well stay and “be your little bunny.”
We are complex beings and the brain is far more complicated than I had described. But I think this lovely story not only calmed Joaquin’s amygdala, it reached deep into his spirit to a network of needs he did not even know he had. In Psalm 139, King David speaks of the God from whose presence he could not flee. Instead of frightening him, it filled him with wonder. “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?...if I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall follow me…How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them!”
Joaquin probably saw himself as the runaway bunny whose mother, like King David’s God, “beset me from behind and before.” Such knowledge was too wonderful for King David. And for little Joaquin.
He took the book home and read it over and over and over again. And then he read it some more. He clutched the book close to his breast in his sleep.
The healing began. The runaway bunny decided to stay. Finally he could be my student and I could be his teacher. Joaquin’s brain was no longer closed. My calls were being put through.
The brain opened.
And then it danced.
