Maturity

My eighth grade Chrysalis class had a good talking circle about maturity. But in the course of talking about it, they spoke as if the taking on of responsibility was naturally accompanied by a letting go of the happiness of childhood. So I asked them, with only a few minutes left, if maturity implied a saddening. The question went around to much shorter, tentative responses and we broke for lunch. I had deliberately refrained from speaking during the circles, wanting the kids to think and articulate for themselves. As we walked back, Josh asked me what I thought about maturity and happiness. I reflexively assumed I would do the classic teacherly “reflecting the question back to him so that he would practice developing his own answer.” But Josh asked with such genuine interest and sincerity that I felt called to answer to the best of my knowledge.

I have developed a deep respect for Josh, partly because of his and Hunter’s pure pursuit of the perfect paper airplane. They make beautiful planes that they adjust and refine after each flight until their planes regularly soar for 10 or more seconds. (On Field Study, one of their planes thrown from a slope rich with ridge-soaring turkey vultures held the class spell-bound with an amazing flight that drifted both back and forth across the slope as well as rising up near the top then gliding back down and finally drifting away several minutes later to collide with the next cliff downriver.)

I began answering Josh, only to discover that the answer I had held in my mind during the talking circle felt weak upon actual expression. Just a place-holder. So my answer started exploring sideways into new thoughts and my voice shifted from teacher to my self. My words were muddled but as I kept talking, trying to give my full mindfulness to his question, the following analogy came to mind which still glows with the feeling of truth.

“When you fly your airplanes, you are in pursuit of beauty, seeking with increasing precision, balance and subtle curves of paper to experience amazing flights. You have inspired and taught the younger students to fly paper airplanes. Some of the younger kids make crude airplanes that fly only five feet and yet they dance around with delight because they changed that piece of paper in a way that makes it move through the air in a new, unpredictable way. However, for you an airplane so poorly built with such short flight (from your perspective) would disappoint and be a waste of your time. So, yes, in the process of your maturing skill with airplanes, you have lost access to sources of happiness (a flight of one second) that are accessible only to a beginner.

“But as you mature, your sense of what is possible expands. You have greater range, greater materials and possibilities with which to create magnificence that far transcends your initial airplanes – like that flight on the cliffs that took the breath away from fifty onlookers. So, it is for me. As I mature, I would not go back. The forces I’m playing with now and what they make possible is so much more wondrous than I ever imagined back as a child. So, no, Josh, happiness is not surrendered as one matures. It matures in ways that are invisible to those younger.”

Over the next few days, I reflected upon that deeply-satisfying answer and realized there was something else I really liked about this lesson. Josh had asked me a question that had called me out into new territory where I found new understanding. Josh had played the role we associate with the teacher and I had played the role we associate with the student. It is enlightening, as a teacher, to experience the student’s perspective. I reflect upon the initiating question and find myself contemplating its open-endedness. It was open-ended in not having a specific answer Josh was looking for. But more importantly, it was open-ended in spirit in that the questioner was seeking the answer alongside the “student.”

“Wow!” I thought, “how amazing it would be if my students could receive from me questions that led them to discoveries as satisfying as I received from Josh.” Teacher training in “higher order thinking skills,” Bloom’s taxonomy, and such can help us master the first open-endedness but not the second. In fact, psychologically/spiritually, a focus on this first quality of “open-endedness” can close us off to the second quality. We distinguish ourselves with professional pride in our ability to guide students to deeper thoughts.

The second quality of open-endedness makes sense in relation to Josh’s question about maturity. It can prove more evasive when teaching fractions or some other area where we, as teachers, know the answers. What brings us into the second quality is when we revel in our not knowing the path by which these particular students will come to understanding of these concepts. Yes, we might know what their final understanding will look like but we don’t know how they’ll get there and that is playing out right now, in real time, and we are part of the dance. When I am aware of myself as being in the presence of my students as explorers forging a path towards understanding that is unique in history, then my teachering interactions take on more of this second quality of open-endedness.