A Sense of Wonder

As my teenage son and I hiked through the woods along the Rio Grande River recently and observed the snowy white egrets in the water, the shades of blue and pink of the Sandia Mountains, and the hot air balloons floating peacefully above us, I reveled in the beauty of it all. While I waited for something more profound to come to me, I recalled the tag line of a 1970’s beer commercial, “It doesn’t get any better than this." There was so much to behold in one place on one day that it was almost overwhelming, and I remembered the name of the Van Morrison album from 1985, A Sense of Wonder.

As a result, I began thinking about how we can help adolescents maintain their sense of wonder in today's world. On the one hand, the web offers them the opportunity to go anywhere, to talk to anyone, and to find out almost anything they want to know in the time it takes Google to pull up the information. On the other hand, teens today have the requisite world-weary skepticism that they have always had, and although each generation of adults may think that the teenagers of their time were the most doubting, the profusion of information available to today's young men and young women may make them the least awestruck of all time.

So, how do we help young adults maintain a sense of awe? In 1956, the naturalist Rachel Carson (who later wrote Silent Spring) asked the same question and produced an essay, in the magazine Woman's Home Companion, called “Help Your Child To Wonder.” In this essay, Carson says, ”It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” Although her essay focuses on her very young son, Carson's lessons would apply to most children and maybe even more so to teenagers.

However, Carson also acknowledges that aiding children in preserving their ability to marvel at the world around them is difficult and requires quite a bit from us adults. As parents, this requires time, patience, and energy. It may require putting down whatever is occupying us, spending time with our children, and demonstrating our excitement with the seemingly mundane. Some of this may come with time in nature or just being fascinated with what is available to us in this day and age. A good friend tells his children when they complain about being bored that "boredom is an insult to the gods." If there ever was a time when children could be bored, that time seems way beyond us now.

As educators, we should celebrate the opportunities to aid our students in nourishing their own sense of wonder. Through our words and deeds, we need to convey an infectious enthusiasm in the delights of everything around us. Beyond teaching facts and academic skills, perhaps the most important thing we can offer our students is how to marvel, how to be exuberant with all of the mysteries in front of them, and how to enjoy just how much there is to learn.

I recently showed our Bosque students a YouTube clip of the Swedish scientist Hans Rosling's innovative and exciting way of showing data demonstrating the correlation of health and wealth from 1810-2009. As Rosling proves, looking at seemingly dry data can be stimulating and fun. With an impish smile, Rosling says after he has wowed us with the data, "Pretty neat, huh?"

Like Rosling, truly successful scientists maintain their sense of joy in the previously inexplicable. At the end of her over fifty-year-old article, Carson says, “Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” Let's all commit to helping our young men and young women appreciate the ineffable and revel in the mysteries around us.

Schools As Home

At a going away party a couple of months ago, someone asked me if we had found a home in New Mexico. To my regret, I offered a somewhat snarky riposte and said that we had a house in Albuquerque, but we had a home in St. Louis. It was only later I learned that Webster’s defines a home as a domicile, i.e., the place where one lives. I was attempting, in my response, to differentiate between the house location in which we would soon reside versus the house in which we had lived since 1994. This “home” was where we brought our children when they left the hospital after their births, the living room where the brit milah (the Jewish circumcision ceremony) was performed, and also where we shared many of our emotionally-laden experiences over the past seventeen years. (If you’re the person who innocently asked the question, I apologize here.) Maybe it was our moving that made me draw such a clear distinction between two seemingly synonymous words, house and home, particularly as we watched the moving truck with all our possessions pull away, and I walked around an empty house and reminisced about the many things that happened there. The more I think about it, though, the more I believe that home connotes something more than merely being the place where we rest our heads every evening.

The notion of what constitutes home also applies to those of us working in schools as we endeavor to create learning communities where every child and adult can feel safe physically, emotionally, and spiritually. As we know, schools can be warm, joyful places where adults engage in meaningful work together; unfortunately, we are all too aware that schools can also be cold, cruel institutions that persistently devalue the people inside their walls. Ultimately, it is up to all of us to create schools where everyone can feel “at home,” but how do we do that?

To make a school a home, we must begin with the adults who work there. We need to make our schools places where every grownup feels valued, trusted, and supported. This does not mean that we do not have standards or that we approve of everything everyone does, but it does mean that we are honest with one another, we address issues when they arise, and we know that we can disagree with each other but still respect one another.

In a similar fashion, we need to teach our students that our school is a place where children are allowed to be who they are and to develop into the people they want to be. Here again, this is not an argument for anything goes; as parents, we don’t approve of all our children do, but we still love them as we’re correcting their behavior or reprimanding them. A major component of adolescence consists of the process of identity formation, where teenagers try on a variety of personalities much like they’re shopping and seeing how different clothes fit. In order for them to do this and to learn who they are, they must be able to experiment with a variety of personality types in the full assurance that they will not be ostracized or castigated. They must be able to take risks and know that they will still be accepted for the people they are.

If we can create schools where each child can be his/her full self every day, then we can give our students the opportunity to fulfill their dreams and become the people they were meant to be. As the writer Mary Angelou once said, “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” Our students want their schools to be a home for them; let’s do everything we can to give them what they so richly deserve.