Why I Root for the Salmon

On most days, it is a challenge to get students to seek out the "other."  In an election season, that task feels downright monumental, like a salmon weaving its way up Niagra Falls.

If we taught school the way politicians seek seats these days--with finger-pointing vitriol, basted in barrels full of vinegar--I doubt our students would learn much at all about themselves, more or less anything substantive about the "other" who is on the receiving end of those diatribes.

Oh, I suppose that's not entirely true.  They would learn, for instance, who's got the most bravado, the best marketing strategies, the snarkiest one-liners.

But I'd prefer working with mirrors that reflect rather than refract.

Color me crazy, but I love those moments when students suddenly see themselves--or, better yet, someone else-- as though for the first time.  It is like morning sunlight fractured into a thousand diamonds on a single blade of grass--breathtaking and symphonic.  And, invariably, in the aftermath of such experiences, these students are left looking over their shoulders, wondering if--hoping that--someone else saw what they just saw.

Even though today's journalists lack the reputation and luster of their muckraking, independent ancestors, there are still those who seek to do the job in that spirit--diligently finding and giving voice to the underrepresented.  Certainly, the most magical experiences in my own classroom often seem to involve "the other"--an idea, a person, a perspective, a medium previously unexplored.

The key is to expect  the students to move outside of their comfort zones, and to give them both the permission and the tools they'll need to muddle through these new things--even if failure or discomfort may follow.  My role in that process is to provide the occasional Google Map and then stay out of the way.

Despite what the politicians may be shouting on TV these days, the means really does justify the end. It is the process--the journey, the hard work of showing up each day with our eyes and minds and hearts wide open and working through the discomfort of our own inexperience--that gives meaning to our lives and to the lives of others.

Life is messy.  And there are good kinds of "messy" and bad kinds of it.  It would serve us well to focus on the former, even if it makes for lousy sound bites.