There I was—the only Westerner sitting around a communal fire with several other men in a workers’ hostel in downtown Tokyo—when an elderly gentleman leaned over to me and said in a portentous tone, “Young man, you are on the eve of a great adventure.” (I promise I am not making this up!) I was in my early 20s and had decided to quit a job teaching English, so I could travel as far and as long as the money I had earned would take me. (My wife still refers to this period in my life as my “walkabout.”) My journey eventually took me from Japan to Hong Kong, overland to Amsterdam, and eventually to Tel Aviv. A year later, vastly richer in experiences but also $3,000 poorer, I returned to the United States to get on with my life.
One of Webster’s Online Dictionary definitions for an adventure is “an exciting or remarkable experience.” While other definitions also mention danger or hazard, an adventure, thankfully, can be amazing without necessarily being death-defying. This is what we hope to provide during Winterim. Whether students are kayaking, hiking, visiting museums, swimming, cooking, walking, riding horses, or interning with a doctor or artist, we want them to be excited and have experiences that are unique and memorable during this weeklong program. As educators, we know that when we interrupt the routine of our daily lives and introduce new ideas or activities, we provide opportunities for students (and their teachers) to learn at a deeper level than before.
Ideally, we should offer a wide variety of experiences during a child’s school years. Although it is important to have some consistency during a student’s time in school, it is when we break the patterns in how we think and what we do that we move to a different level of perception and understanding. This break with our previous ways of thinking and being is irreversible, and we see our world anew. Experiences like these can occur in a classroom discussion or during a lab, while performing a piece of music or drama, working on a mathematical problem, or painting a picture. Whether it is apocryphal or not, the story of Archimedes exclaiming “Eureka!” in the bathtub provides us with a metaphor for the epiphanous experience of seeing our world in an exciting, new way.
Over the past decades, I have been fortunate to witness those moments when students “wake up” to a new world. Whether it was a junior in history class who would look up stunned and say, “Ohhh! Now I get it!”; or a 6th grader in the bosque who, by virtue of her research, now understands life in this riparian forest; or a student debating a current “hot” topic in Spanish and having the realization that he is actually “thinking” in a different language—what good schools do is provide opportunities for students to alter their long-held views and reshape how they see themselves and their lives.
Winterim does this in a way that is immediately apparent. At Bosque, we see students having these educational “adventures” all the time; I consider myself lucky to watch our students become different people right before my eyes. When it happens, it is priceless.
