No Ordinary Children
A long time ago I copied a quote from an Annie Dillard novel that got stuffed away in an old folder. I found it today and tried to recall what exactly I was thinking and doing when I set it down. Dillard wrote: “No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.”
I am grateful for the many extraordinary children I have met. They cross my path and unwittingly shift my complacency, open up my perspective anew and leave me feeling a sense of awe. When I reread the quote, I started thinking about the army of young people I’ve worked with over four decades. I wanted to remember the ones who struck me as extraordinary, different, and even quirky, and the ones who stopped me in my tracks by being who they were or by what they saw that I had forgotten or overlooked in becoming an adult.
My years with middle and high schoolers placed me in the center of that transitional time when our brains are washed by hormones, sending us into alien orbits of confusion. It was easy to recall my own journey as I watched their swinging moods and frustrations, their posturing and retreats into safety, their bravado, and their sudden bursts of excitement. They had no idea that the brain they carried around with them was going through its second biggest change since the age of two. Their brains were, indeed, altering reality. Every day, I watched them struggle to shake off childhood and then fiercely grasp after it. I am grateful to have been reminded daily that I too went through this perilous passage.
It is an old adult habit to categorize young people. We see in them echoes of mistakes we’ve made and often intervene to “prevent” them from going the wrong way. We make up our minds that a child is clever, or spoiled, or slow to learn. How we come upon these judgments is unclear. Yet, we persist in our notion that a child, or, for that matter, any human, can so easily be summed up by a few labels. This may be a harmful exercise. Many students I’ve known now “own” the stories some teacher or authority figure has thrust upon them about who they are and what they are capable of. It has now become their “reality,” and is not easily erased.
As we set out to support our students, we need to keep in mind that there should no longer be any difference between what we teach them and who we are. If we encourage them to read, we should be readers. When we ask them to become good listeners, be sure they’ve had plenty of opportunity to witness adults around them paying attention. This requires teachers to attain sufficient intellectual, personal, emotional and spiritual maturity. Developing teachers to reach these goals, unfortunately, is not a common concern in our teacher preparation institutions or in the school work place. A deeper conversation is required.
