Envisioning the Whole ChildIt's after midnight and I can't sleep. I've just watched a movie that I can't really get over: it's called Arrival. Based on a short story by Chiang, "The Story of Your Life," the movie examines the complexity of time and choices and pain. As the aliens communicate their cyclical language, unbound by the confines of time, it is clear that their universal language sees everything as it simply is in its entirety at one moment.
So, why am I sitting here writing and thinking it has any connection to education?. I'll try to explain. In the movie, because the linguist narrator learns their language, she begins thinking in their language and can therefore examine life without the boundary of time. She floats from when her child was a baby to the memory of her death to the moments she had in between. So, all the while, her perspective is on literally the whole child, not just the individual moment. And so I'm laying here thinking about how very cute babies are and their first moments. And then I'm thinking about how our students arrive to us each day, some beaten down by life, some responding in not always nice ways. It's easy to become jaded as a teacher, but what I'm wondering, is if we pictured that student in his or her entirety, start to finish, if we could see that student as an eager kindergartener sitting upon the tiger carpet square, sqiggling just to choose a book to read in class, if we could have a lens of the entire life and see the joy that kid felt the first time he solved a math problem in his first grade years, if we could see his wonderment as a two year old playing with a squishy caterpillar, in wonder and awe over its novelty., If perhaps we could see her grubby hands spinning the globe in wonderment, drawing and singing about her discoveries.. then would we plan differently with our content, speak differently when we're on the verge of exasperation with behavior, think differently when we hear another person giving up hope on that child? It's a complex question but one that's keeping me awake tonight. The pivotal question in the movie was the following: if you could see your life start to finish would you change anything?. And so, tonight, as an educator, I'm wondering... If I could see my students' lives start to finish, would I change anything about my role in their lives?. Would I walk by that student having a tough day?. Would I make that lesson more enthralling?. Would I take a second with my own child to read a book? If every second determines every little direction (and we know through neuroscience it does), then are we channeling every opportunity we get with every child, even the ones who come to us from very hard places for the future result we want to see? If we could see our students lives birth to the future all at the same moment, and if we could see our own in the same way, are we living each moment out the way we want the end path to look?. And alas, I lie awake.
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