Choices

On the night before my wedding, my best man reassured a young and anxious me:

There are ten things that are going to go wrong tomorrow. My job is to make sure you don't know about any of them. You have a choice: either let me take care of it, or worry.

I had a choice. I could trust my friend, Tucker, to care for me, or I could worry. With the exception of Hurricane Danny's surprise arrival, I never found out what else went wrong (and I learned that rainy photos are really beautiful).

We make choices all the time about how to act, how to respond, how to be.

I was thinking about this moment this week as my 8th grade world cultures students discussed the Japanese response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. What was it about the Japanese culture, their psyche, values, their ethos, that allowed them to withhold outward resentment?

They made a choice.

When my 7th graders discussed Atticus Finch's "universe of obligation" in To Kill a Mockingbird, they recognized that he was hedging the cultural norms...that he was taking a risk, and there was a cost involved.

He made a choice.

As I watched the Environmental and Human Rights task forces prepare for World Congress this week, their peer-elected leaders guiding their final preparations and rehearsals, I saw the emphasis they were putting on human choices.

We have a choice here, my students reminded me.
We cause these problems.
Doing the right thing is inconvenient, sure, but change doesn't come about because it's cozy. Sometimes it hurts. You've got to give something up to transform.

We are making choices.

During our study of To Kill a Mockingbird this year, we've used a resource called "Facing History, Facing Ourselves." The motto of this educational resource is

People make choices; choices make history.

Woah. What a line. It's one of those sentences you almost want to read twice. Read slower.

People make choices;
choices make history.

My division head has always suggested that those tricky 7th - 9th grade years of early adolescence are really about two things: independent learning and relationships. And both of those areas have to do with choices.

On a related note, my school has adopted a new disciplinary practice this spring. We've replaced detentions with a more responsive process requiring students whose actions (i.e. choices) require a disciplinary response to have a conversation with their teacher and produce a written reflection to a prompt.

In short, we want our students to see patterns in their actions. We want them to see that their choices illustrate their histories, and that there are subsequent choices that can dictate their futures. We want them to understand that, like my best man assured me, there are people who can support us, but we have to make a choice to lean on them. Discipline shouldn't be shameful, it should be restorative. It should help us see the patterns of our choices, and the ways they affect our learning and our relationships.

Like Tucker said, ten things will probably go wrong today, but we have a choice about how we react to those trials.

Whether it's the ethos of a nation, the character of a father in 1930s Alabama, our collective global impact, or our individual actions in middle school, we make our choices, and our choices make history.