Howard Gardner and compounding grains of sand.

If I'm being honest, I often find myself questioning my impact. I wonder whether I'm doing enough, whether I could be doing something more, becoming something more, striving for bigger, greater things.

When I feel lost, the phrase I speak aloud most is, "I just don't know what I'm supposed to be doing."

And today, I thought about impact and about the ways impact is felt and experienced by those around us.

Today in World Cultures class, my students learned about "dumb barter," a method of silent trade employed in the west African Malinke Empire up until about 600 years ago. Instead of having my students take notes and study the activity, though, I had them act it out. 

One group of students was the gold-mining Wangara; another were the salt-bearing Berbers; and a third group were the Malinke, an ethnolinguistic group who lived along the Niger and Senegal Rivers.

Because the three groups shared no common language, they relied on drum beats to indicate trade practices, with the drums echoing up and down the river. 

So, as my 8th grade students pounded on tables, their classmates navigated a sea of chairs to find their way "up river" to engage in silent trade.

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During morning advisory a group of students was found "studying" for geography by putting together a collection of map puzzles I have in my room. 

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Meanwhile, later in the day, during English class, my students were invited to explore the nature and organization of a sestina, a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern.

They employed the sestina format in constructing chapter summaries of Chimamanda Adichie's novel, Purple Hibiscus. What, they asked themselves, should their six words be? Which words provide poetic richness while also providing textual legitimacy to Adichie's advancement of plot and theme?

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So, what then is the point? 

Ah, the point.

Well, the point relates to our impact and the way that our influence is compounded.

So, before I get to the point, a brief comment about compounding.

Imagine you are given a grain of sand on the day you are born. On each birthday, that grain of sand is doubled. On your third birthday you have four grains of sand, and on your fourth birthday you have eight, and so on. Well, by your 65th birthday, do you know how much sand you'll have?

All of it.

Like, literally all of it. You would have the Sahara, the Atacama, the Australian outback, the Thar, th Kalahari, the Mojave, all the beaches.

You would have all the sand in the world.

So, back to the point.

Yesterday I was inspired by a colleague who reminded me of the importance of Howard Gardner and providing opportunities to assess students and inspire students through novel means of engagement.

This colleague compounded that reality by sharing the insight with a group of upper school colleagues. 

Now, I have further compounded the impact of connecting multiple intelligence to my students by engaging them in acting and poetry, both creative expressions that are divergent from historic forms of assessment.

Don't get me wrong, neither of these tools was particularly unique or inspired...both were simple. Yet, at the very same time they both opened a door for students to walk through. Will I see my impact? Probably not. After all, all I did was hand each of my students a grain of sand.

But I can fall asleep knowing that when they left my class, my students were given a grain of sand. And tomorrow? Tomorrow, they just might wake to find those very grains have doubled overnight.