Slowing Down

Earlier this week I watched a video clip from a well known personality in the world of personal development and growth. This celebrity enjoys interviewing experts in a variety of fields, each of whom offers insights to help viewers rethink the systems, patterns, and mindsets that dictate the ways they function and interact with the habitats and people around them.

I enjoy gleaning insights from these talks, and I often find application to the relationships I cultivate in my classroom.

This week, I listened as an expert professed that "the worst exchange we can make as professionals is trading our time for money."

I understand that if we can create systems that allow our money to grow without our daily engagement or manipulation (i.e. "passive income" or "compounding income"), our money grows more quickly.

But when it comes to impact...when it comes to the exchanges that have value, I just don't see it.

Sure, I could create programs and systems that enable my work as a classroom teacher to be conducted in the absence of my instruction, conversation, or connection with them. I could build apps for other teachers and sell my lesson plans online and engage in all those entrepreneurial pursuits...and I might do that. In fact, I think about it often.

But the reality is, when I think about my decision to be a teacher, shortcuts and growth just can't be fabricated. The currency in a classroom is in the relationship. And relationships take time.

Without connections, something would be missing.

Education isn't about what we do. It's about how we do things. How we spend our time.

Our shared days in the classroom are finite, and yet we have the opportunity to be with one another in these moments. Our time is our currency, because nothing is of greater value.

This week, as many of the students in my classroom were out sick, we happened upon a really wonderful project that takes time. My students are creating maps of Africa and looking for correlations between them. My hope is that they will struggle to see ways that their research and collections of data align with one another; but sometimes they won't. Sometimes the investments of time they make will be distinguished by the lack of correlation...by the thing they fail to see come to fruition. I want to leave them enough time to be okay with that...to appreciate the journey.

They are trading time for something that might not fill their bank account...that might not compound. That might not yield a 100% when it comes to conventional measurements of "winning" or "victory."

But I love spending time with my students as they collect data, as they pore over spreadsheets and graph ideas. I love seeing their colored pencils emerge as they draw maps and we play music from the ancient Malinke empire of west Africa.

We are spending time slowly, together, letting the process guide us. Some of the maps aren't particularly good when it comes to coloring within the lines and employing key-related conventions of color and cohesion, but none of that matters. The project is about spending time well. It is about forgetting where we are and letting the final product emerge without the stress of a looming deadline. Sure, it needs to be finished, but instead of having a quick deadline, I decided this year to extend the deadline and invite students who finished their maps earlier to look up supporting images, draw a third map, find a current event that linked to their inquiry, or do something else that is rich and immersive in guiding the ways they're growing.

So, that's what I've learned, that's where I am.

Slowing down and holding space for the directions and inspirations of my students.