Translator: Theresa Ranft Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
You know, I've heard a lot of interesting things
come out of the mouths of my students over the years.
A little boy said to me,
"When I grow up, I want to be a transformer."
Another student yelled out,
"When I grow up I want to have a castle and an army of monkeys."
(Laughter)
The other day, in Art class, a grade 6 boy yelled out,
"She ruined my character!"
To which I had to turn my back to the class and laugh behind my...
Under my breath, I said, "You have no idea how true that really could be."
(Laughter)
There was a student that asked me, though.
She said, "Mr. G.
Why did the first immigrants in North America
steal from the First Nations people when they were sharing it?"
I had to admit I didn't have a good answer
and it has bothered me ever since,
and we've been bringing it into our discussions now in the classroom.
My students make sense out of the world in these ways.
Like all students, they're just trying to make sense of the world,
and they do this by asking questions and interacting.
My classroom is part sounding board and part brick wall
where ideas get bounced around,
regardless whether they're serious or silly.
Most of the time it's just youthful exuberance:
students being students.
But in my classroom the students are valued for their voice,
respected for, and they know they're heard;
it's part of a healthy education.
There is one thing I've never heard a student say.
I've never heard a student say,
"You know what my dream is when I grow up?
Not having any of my dreams come true."
Because that is something a child would never say,
nor anyone else for that matter.
To quote Sir Ken Robinson:
"Why would they?"
So, despite trillions of dollars spent annually on education
to make this world a better place,
our students are still slipping through the cracks
and into the most marginalized spaces of our society.
The title of my talk is called
"No child in grade 1 dreams of living on the street."
The longer version of this might sound like this:
"No child in grade 1 dreams of being abused.
No child in grade 1 dreams of watching their home destroyed by fire or war.
No child dreams of being addicted to drugs or alcohol.
No child dreams of being a prostitute,
of being incarcerated, or suffering from mental illness,
or living on the streets."
Walk around any city in this world
and you'll still see that things are not going as well as they should.
People sleeping on grates or lining up at homeless shelters for the night
does not scream to me that everything is alright.
As teachers we have to stop providing the answers
and start asking this one question:
How can we help?
It's our responsibility now.
But first, we have to figure out what motivates us to help at all.
I'm not naive enough to think that altruism is enough
because we have enough of it in every room we fill.
So I have to go back to this other question:
What makes us help?
What are you passionate about?
Are you passionate about coffee, like me?
Are you passionate about education?
Are you passionate about changing the world?
Are you passionate about learning new things?
I am passionate about education,
if you didn't guess that already.
But I have a problem with the word "passion."
I wrestle with it because it passes over my lips
and I hear it spoken from so many others,
but I do not see enough of it embodied in our educational lives.
If you're like me and you have a passion for education,
then the job is simple:
to use it to impact the community that we live in,
to make a difference for those that are falling through the cracks,
to help our students keep their dreams.
I'm talking about compassion.
I think it's time that we put aside the three "Rs" we've been teaching
and introduce a new three "Rs",
and they're not the "reduce, reuse, recycle."
I'm talking about relationship building, resiliency,
and restoration of self,
so that when our students are knocked down by life events they cannot prevent,
that we're teaching them to arise stronger, wiser, and more whole.
Tonight, 35,000 people are going to sleep on the streets in Canada,
with another million in the USA.
All despite what we would call "progress"
and what we would call an education that most of them had received.
I think as teachers we have a new "to do" list in our classrooms
about recommitting, reimagining, and reinventing what we need to do
to protect our students.
They say that every picture tells a story.
So then this class picture behind me must be able to fill a library.
There we are, all gussied up in our Sunday best.
What you see are 21 simultaneous narratives being written in 1972
by some mischievously complex little creatures
with hopes and dreams of their own.
The little future teacher you see behind me
had his own hopes and dreams,
and he would do anything to get them,
including running away to the circus
until his mom started to help him pack.
(Laughter)
But there was one dream that I had that occupied my time
way more than any others,
and I didn't even have to leave my living room.
I wanted to be an astronaut.
Watching the Apollo missions live on my television as a child
set alight in me an imagination that was boundless.
NASA took me to beyond the moon and the stars.
They told me that the impossible was possible,
that dreams did come true.
And I knew this because I saw it on TV.
With the world beaming into our home each night
came some other realizations that things were not as rosy in the world
as they were in my little corner of Wyoming.
I screen-witnessed the Vietnam War on a nightly basis,
I saw poverty in America like I'd never thought existed,
and I saw civil unrest in its people.
My heart ached for those
that were suffering from any of these events.
And it began to affect me.
When it got to be too much it was easy to get shooed out of the room
and be told it's OK,
that you're going to be alright.
But suddenly my dreams had competition from nightmarish realities as well.
And although I didn't like it at the time,
those nightmares and dreams
have helped me serve in my classroom to this day.
What I realized from an early age -
as a teacher, I'm really quite young -
(Laughter)
what I realized at an early age as a teacher
was that for real learning to happen in my classroom
that the well-being of my students had to come first;
that if their mental health was at risk
they too were at risk of falling through the cracks,
flying under the radar and being lost.
Unfortunately, when I entered the classroom
I don't know whether I was able to make that a reality.
You see, learning to be a teacher qualified me to be in there,
but it really didn't equip me with how to deal with situations like these,
with children that were suffering when they were losing their dreams
before their eyes, before my eyes.
Watching a child struggle to me
was like watching then write something while someone broke their pencils,
tore and crumpled their papers,
and hurled insults at them the whole time.
It made me think that maybe the children were suffering and I didn't know it.
In hindsight, I think about the one that got away.
Do you have a student that might represent the one that got away
or someone you've taught in the past?
At first, I thought, "Not my problem."
I just sluffed it off,
the situation is beyond my control.
But as I come to think of it, even six years later
I wonder now what I could have done to improve that child's life.
In her 2014 TEDMED talk, Nadine Burke Harris speaks of something
called "Adverse Childhood Experiences", also known as ACEs.
These include abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction.
She says children that endure ACEs in their lives
are significantly more likely to suffer
from mental health and physical health issues
if they go unnoticed, untreated, or ignored as just misbehavior.
Countries all around the world, and including the United States,
would prefer to spend six to ten times more money on incarceration
rather than what they would spend on education.
What if we could flip that statistic, empty out overcrowded prisons
and provide equitable access to education for everyone?
In the classroom, we have to remember
that misbehavior, or behavior is communication;
that that student who's acting out may be crying out for help.
Before you take them to task,
count to ten,
count to 50 if you have to.
And then think, "Is what I'm about to do for this child
going to push them away or bring them closer to me
so that they might get some help?"
Think about a student in your classroom that might have all of a sudden
dropped out from the usual "they're not participating,
they're not engaging, they're lethargic."
"Things don't mean to matter as much."
"They're missing due dates."
Before you get after them, did you try being kind?
Did you know that your words of kindness
may be the only ones that child hears all day?
Did you ask them if they were hungry?
Wouldn't the cost of a box of granola bars
be worth a more engaged and calmer student?
Maybe that child just needs someone to talk to.
You don't have to have the answers,
you just have to listen.
What if that child is grieving a sick relative,
or someone who has recently died?
Are you giving them the support and the care
that they need to grieve their loss?
In my mind, it all starts with community.
If we weave community into our classrooms
we have a chance of reaching our students before they slip through.
Think of us all as chords being threaded into a rope:
whether we are 3 or 33 or 233,
we would not be easily broken when we bind together.
And I look at it that way,
that we build community in our classrooms.
Imagine if your space was able to welcome everyone
that walks through the door,
and that each one knew that they were valued,
that they mattered,
and that they were there to do great things,
that they walked in with dreams and were walking out with more dreams.
So I'm asking you to think about how you see education
to include passion with the compassion that I spoke about earlier;
that we have a role to play, that we are all capable of doing this job,
and that we're going to equip our students to make the world a better place;
so that students that enter our classroom suffering from ACEs in their lives
do not suffer alone and they do not suffer long;
that they would be able to recover their dreams,
to be able to go beyond the moon and the stars,
and to overcome adverse childhood experiences
and have them replaced with active, compassionate education.
Join me!
Thank you.
(Applause)