I’ve been working on editing the video of my daughter’s school play. In editing the video, I have to go back and forth through small parts of it to find the places to cut, merge, add subtitles, etc. It’s painstaking work, and should be boring, but I find it enjoyable. It’s a sort of meditation.
And in doing this, I get to see other people’s kids, over and over, repeating themselves each time the same, yet different, more deeply. I particularly enjoyed one part where I was trying to match the subtitles to what a small girl was chanting as she danced. You couldn’t really hear the chant; it faded away into nothing somewhere a few words before the end.
But you can definitely see her dance. You can see that she loves the dance, she is inhabiting the dance. The way one of my kids might look when figuring something out on the computer, or making new clothes for her babydoll. The entranced look, that rapture, that people get when they’re doing something they love. That’s the look that this girl has for her dance. Who cares about the words? The dance says it all.
What amazes me about this, and about all the little things I notice about other people’s children, is that they are so unlike my own kids, that they surprise me, over and over.
In the recent rains, I had to step around so many worms that had crawled up from the flooded culverts onto the road. They thought they were saving themselves, but of course, they were killing themselves. As soon as the sun hit the asphalt, they would dry up and die. I dropped a few back onto the moist earth, but I couldn’t save them all. Because that’s what earthworms do. When it rains, they climb out to dry land, and it doesn’t matter that dry land now means an asphalt road that will kill them. They still do it and always will.
But people are different. We are each so amazingly different. We each love our own children, to be sure, but to watch other children, really watch them, is an amazing experience. You think you know about children till you really watch other children. Then you realize that you know nothing. Or perhaps you know everything, and what you know is that everything is.
A teacher friend was explaining to me what she thinks is the hardest thing to teach about teaching. She said, “You watch each child and you try to get a sense of how to reach them. And for each child, you’re going through this mental process of going through all the knowledge of curriculum and methods that you have and finding what will help that particular child. And there’s no way to quantify that.”
Each and every child is a package of genes, experiences, desires, fears. Each child is a symphony of possibility, a tragedy of missed opportunity, the thrill of adventure. No child is an earthworm, which climbs up onto the asphalt when it rains. You can’t devise one worksheet that will teach them all the proper way to add numbers. You can’t have one play where they will all learn to play the parts the same way. Each time a child dances that dance, or chants that chant, it is hers.
It is something new, and it cannot be quantified.
