Universal Truths?

I blame the primordial soup theory for one of my more bizarre quirks--a deep affinity for banjo and fiddle music. I live in the Detroit area and have lived in the industrial North my whole live save for a brief hiatus when I claimed Alabama as my sweet home.  And yet, the soup theory gives me my excuse: while my mother was raised by Canadians in Grosse Pointe, my father grew up in a tobacco hamlet in south central Kentucky.  The joy I feel when I hear anyone picking on the banjo must lie within the primordial soup of my paternal genetic make-up.  Right? Right.

This “ooze theory” extends past my own eccentricities (which, for the record, I can completely explain away every time). I was driving to school on Jefferson in Grosse Pointe, Michigan last Friday.  The sun was rising over Lake St. Clair, and the sky held that particular fall beauty that escapes words. I was digging it.  I thought of the things that stir me at my soul’s level, and those things that link me to other people. Music, natural beauty, good food--these things are unexplainable and universal.  And then I had another one of my random thoughts.  I thought about a teacher at my school who has taught for the past 38 years.  She was speaking about the shifts in education, and it all converged for me.

The primordial soup theory isn’t really a mystery.  In my world, it is a key idea that exists in basic human relationships. A teacher and a student is a classic archetype, but the key that is fading is the relational aspect of mentorship. James Hillman extols the importance of a mentor in his Jungian inspired tome, The Soul’s Code.  Hillman believes that most people have a major mentor relationship at least once in their lives.  For most American school children, that mentor ends up being a teacher. 

What happens to the mentor relationship when a computer replaces a person as a teacher?  This is not a snarky anti-technology rant.  I am pro-technology.  It is here, it is powerful, and it can be an amazing tool.  I do, however, brood over the role relationships will assume when a digital display seperates students and teachers.  Humans are pack animals.  John Donne put that idea a bit more poetically when he wrote that “No man is an island/Entire of itself/..Any man’s death diminishes me/Because I am involved in mankind.” Literature (and yes, literature DOES matter) extols the need humans have for other humans.  Robert Penn Warren’s spider web theory in All the King’s Men, Hamlet’s sub-theme of friendship, John Knowles heartbreaking betrayal in A Separate Peace: these novels reflect an inherent human need for contact, authentic human contact.

So as my state moves to digital classrooms, I hope Michigan’s leaders will pull out their child’s reading list, read the novels their children are reading, and think about their favorite teacher.  I am willing to bet that teacher was important NOT because of the lessons they taught.  A teacher’s legacy is inspiration, and inspiration comes from forging relationships.  So teach on, and keep building those old-school relationships that technology has yet to replicate.

The Magic of Middle School? WHAT?

This new school year is, in many ways, a truly new experience for me.  Instead of spending September 3rd introducing my syllabi, I spent this year’s first day scurrying around a middle school showing 7th graders how to use a rotating lock.  From a ten page AP Lit syllabus to “Now watch me.  It goes right-left-right,” the incongruity of middle school has impressed itself upon me. 

Today, though, I felt the magic of middle school.  Yep.  I really do mean to write “magic.”  Those painfully awkward years that everyone blocks out or later regrets are magical.  The learning that occurs during this age is bested only by the osmosis-like intellectual growth of infants and toddlers.  The hallways of Richards Middle School were practically electric today.  There was a visceral academic hum in the seventh grade hallway, and as I walked to my office, I realized again how amazing schools can be.

I know that opinion might not be popular these days as the entire educational system seems to be under attack.  That saddens me.  I saw kids today eagerly engaged in literary Socratic circles, science experiments, social study scavenger hunts, and a myriad of other academic endeavors.  This cross sample of students was completely heterogeneous; we have every demographic covered at Richards--from socio-economics to race, all of our students come from diverse backgrounds.  That antiquated idea of the American melting pot was alive and well and successfully bringing students together who two weeks ago didn’t know each other.  This is part of the magic of middle school.

Middle school is the transition time, the liaison to high school and further educational endeavors.  The first seven years of school are self-contained.  The first seven years put students into little pods that move together under the direction of one teacher.  Middle school, though, breaks those pods apart and brings six different elementary schools of 60-90 sixth graders together for the first time into a graduating class identified not by an elementary school but by a graduating year.  These students who competed against each other in 6th grade field day become a unified force of 400+ students who in six years will be the graduating class of 2019.  

Public education demands that our students learn more than just academic facts.  Our students learn how to be responsible, respectful citizens of an increasingly diverse world.  That was the hum today.  I was witnessing strangers and rivals become friends, and that transition was possible because they were sharing a mutual experience: learning. 

Education can transform life like very few other experiences can.  The students I saw today were maturing not just academically; they were growing into adulthood as they risked learning about others.  A classroom is so much more than four walls with motivational  posters.  It is a doorway to the experiences that shape who we are and who we will become.