This week has found my students looking at life through the perspective of a journalist. I've asked them to seek out stories worth telling; stories that might not be headline-grabbing on the surface, but that--with a bit of investigation--might yield some morsel of interest and societal value. The stories that inspire and uplift are the stories they're seeking.
Most news stories, my thoughtful students noted, tend focus on emotions. Whether the emotions are fear, anger, sadness, or some element of human desire, my students recognize that the media likes to sensationalize and polarize.
But my students? They're focusing this week on finding GOOD in the world around them and seeking out human stories that make them feel inspired and compelled to do good, themselves.
It's no accident that this exercise is taking place around Martin Luther King, Jr.'s weekend: he is a man whose legacy has been gilded with grandeur. We've also continued reading Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and my students are struggling to define what, exactly, makes a person GREAT. Is it their deeds or their heart?
"Can you be great and flawed?" they ask.
"Well, aren't we all flawed?" another student suggests.
"Can't you stay dignified and humble, though, even in the midst of your flaws?"
"Is being great the same thing as being good?"
These are the questions my students are asking each other. They're really good. The students and the questions.
One student struck me when they remarked,
"Isn't goodness about thinking about others, but greatness [comes from] thinking about yourself?"
Wow. I'm not sure whether I agree (I simply need more time to digest it), but I love the question. I love the sentiment. I love the way my brilliant, beautiful-minded students are dissecting the ways history has defined great men and women, and they are questioning, questioning, questioning the merits of that greatness...always.
Robert Hutchins once had this to say about education:
"Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible."
My students are thinking straight, inflaming their intellects, widening their horizons...and, throughout it all, they are unsettling my mind.
They are good.
And I think that's great.
When Will McDonough was a little boy, he loved to learn. In fact, he still does. Will is a teacher now, and every Thursday he writes about something he's learning in the classroom. He's pretty busy, so he takes just 30 minutes to free write; then, regardless of how polished the ideas or mechanics might be, he publishes it. It's incomplete. It's a start. And it feels good.
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