Right on Time

Buck O'Neil is one of my heroes. I never met the man, but were I to assemble a dinner party of human beings I admire and with whom I would want to spend an evening, Buck would be at the head of the table.

Buck played professional baseball in the negro leagues during the 1930s and 40s. He never got a chance to play in the Major Leagues because he was black. Nevertheless, when Buck was asked about whether he wished he'd been born a little later, or wished that baseball had been desegregated earlier, he responded,

"Waste no tears for me. I didn't come along too early. I was right on time."

I thought of this quote this week as I interacted with my students. We were discussing what defines a good invention as we finished up our study of India.

We spent a day exploring families of the world by using the Gapminder website, Dollar Street.

The website allows people (my students, myself, YOU!) to explore the circumstances of families of the world.* I asked students to brainstorm what they thought these families needed. 

We discussed the importance of asking good questions, of avoiding assumptions that are based upon our own ethnocentric experiences--our own needs.

After the students had conversed amongst themselves about what they perceived families' needs to be, we looked at some of the short passages about each family. There, we discovered, for example, that the Chandmoni Bibi family who lives in Calcutta is actually more concerned with the dangerous traffic outside their home than they are with their level of food insecurity or the $31 dollars per month the father, Abdul Khaled, makes as a day laborer. One student exclaimed, 

"Maybe...I mean, what if...what they actually just need a fence?"

a classmate chimed in,

"But will a fence make them happy?"

Then, a third classmate said, barely audible

"I don't know. What if they don't want to be happy the way we want to be happy...what if they just want to be safe?"

This moment did two things for me. One, it made me incredibly proud of my students. They were dwelling in the "WHAT IFs" of the world. These are the difference-making questions, the ones that transform what is possible, and the ones that raise the ceilings of our collective capabilities, and the ones that innovate and imagine and transform. 

But more importantly, this conversation reminded me of Buck O'Neil. 

The news today has the ability to make us feel unsafe. Especially so for those of us who are parents or educators--the people who spend their lives working with young people and supporting them as they learn to navigate the world. Isn't that all of our wish? For our children to be safe?

But as I listen to my students, as I watch in awe at the marriage between their hopefulness, their insights, and their brimming curiosity, I am reminded that they didn't come along too late or too early...the world needs their ideas and their hope and their unabashed willingness to believe the best and to desire to learn.

They are right on time.

*Given the reality that circumstances are different from culture, it's valuable to recognize how little we actually know about a family's traditions, values, beliefs, or way of life as a result of the stuff they possess, or the places they inhabit. This continues to be a necessary element to the World Cultures curriculum at my school--ensuring we don't misinterpret a group of people's daily life and circumstances as the definitive story of their culture.