A number of years ago, motivational speaker Roger Crawford addressed the Wayne County teachers at the opening session of the school year. Crawford, who was born with legs so deformed that he eventually wore prostheses and with hands missing a number of fingers grew up to become the national collegiate tennis champion. Full of platitudes, he certainly was an inspiration about the power of the human spirit. Over the years, I incorporated some of his sayings into journal prompts for my students. “I miss one hundred percent of the shots I don’t take.” “Shoot for the moon. If you miss, the stars aren’t half bad.”
Before students would write in their journals, we would discuss the meanings of such quotations. For years with the moon entry, students, like folks for centuries, would talk about setting goals and realizing that all of our plans might not lead us exactly to our targeted destination. However, a couple of years ago after such a discussion, one student said, “Mrs. Denty, do you realize that stars are much farther away from us than the moon? We’re not talking about settling for half bad; we’re talking about going farther than we can even dream!” Wow! What a powerful observation!
We teachers often encounter students who are smarter than we are. Many of our students learn faster than we do and already possess knowledge that we will never have and frequently don’t really want to know. Our job with such students is to draw on our own years of experience to help them utilize their abilities to learn all that they can and to find ways of using their superior intelligence to improve life for all of us. While I delighted in discovering the uniqueness in each of my students, I particularly found that the brightest of my students challenged me to find new avenues of learning for them to explore. When I didn’t have the answers, I loved learning new ideas with them. Of course, I’ve always loved learning.
Last year, one of the yearbook staffers with a huge vocabulary at his command took on the task to find an appropriate word for the Just for Fun page in the Mini-Mag. For the year that we didn’t move into a new high school featured by the theme, “Standing Here Until You Make Me Move,” he located the archaic word “absquatulate” and asked a variety of people the question, “What did you do the last time you absquatulated?” As you can imagine, he gathered quite a collection of funny responses, most of which we could print. The word means “squatters must decamp” as in absquatulating from the old school building and moving into the new one. As an adviser who had grown wise in the ways of teenagers, I double checked the word and its meaning before we included it in the yearbook. However, chalk up one more student who not only taught me a new word, but also reminded me once again of the fun in words.
All occupations - education, engineering, construction, law, journalism, computers, medicine, auto mechanics, politics, music, art, the list is endless - have their own jargon. At first, we’re often intimidated because experts in these field tend to talk in terms we lay people don’t understand. However, if issues are important to us - our health, our children or our pocketbook are involved, we begin to ask the right questions until we do comprehend. Whether we ever understand all the intricate details of any profession or not, we want doctors who know what they are doing to treat us, teachers who are knowledgeable both in their field and in the way our own children learn to educate, auto mechanics who can make sense of all that maze of wires and parts under the hood to repair our vehicles, and politicians who really desire to serve society, not seek a personal agenda, to be elected.
We should never be afraid of people who are smarter than we are. In all phases of our lives, we should take advantage of their expertise. We want in charge of - businesses, governments, classrooms, everything - people who not only know well what they are doing, but also who display courage and integrity in the use of their knowledge. Whenever we encounter such smart people, knowledgeable and responsible, we, like I did with my students, should learn all we can from them.
2003
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