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Foremost lesson
is to know yourself

Posted at the front of my classroom, under the flag my students and I pledge allegiance to every morning, is the poem "Advice to Travelers," by Walker Gibson, containing a message more significant than any academic lesson I could teach. In the poem, you see, a burro eats his own shipping ticket, leaving him standing idle in a warehouse with no destination.

Poor burro! If only he were able to take the poet's parting advice: "The moral hardly needs the showing: Don't keep things locked up deep inside / Say who you are and where you're going."

More than I want my students to knock 'em dead in April on the Hawaii State Assessment; more than I want them to know their multiplication tables inside out and backward; more than I want them to be able to write masterful essays or draw an isosceles triangle with dazzling precision -- I want them to know who they are, where they're going and how to say it!

I'm sure back in kindergarten someone asked these students what they wanted to be when they grew up. Now that they're insightful, experienced, wily, enterprising fifth-graders, they have a clearer view of their dreams, so the other day, I posed the question again. I learned that in my classroom is a future lawyer, an aspiring chef, an ambitious librarian. One can't decide between being a veterinarian or professional dog-walker; another aims to play in the NFL. "But," he points out, "There's the NBA, too."

Our softball player wonders if she can go to college AND play pro ball. As astronaut Ellison Onizuka told a cafeteria full of similar dreamers when he visited Manoa Elementary in 1985, "Anything, guys. You can do anything you want."

I ENVISION EACH of my students as a traveler, on his or her way to places we can, for now, only imagine. It's hard to convince them that the countless hours we spend on polygons and paragraphs has anything to do with their journey, but it's our everyday task. The hardest thing about teaching also is the best part -- figuring out a way to show the kids every day that there's more to school than tests, and more to life than school.

School is an essential daily stopover, holding within its walls the blood, sweat and tears without which no journey would be complete. These students are not going to get where they're going without facing adversity. They are not going to breeze through life without a conflict. I want my students to know that a productive, thinking, peaceful environment does not require them to agree with everyone they meet on the road. Sometimes, they will stand alone with their most valuable thoughts, and at times like these, they must know how to remain standing.

As I write this, the students and I have 67 days remaining at this stopover, and I marvel at the realization: They will leave me for another set of teachers, but they will not be ours forever. They are going places!

We have such a short time to share our knowledge with them. And it's amazing -- kids are already whole beings when they walk into a classroom, full of stories, experiences, jokes, ideas, gladness, worry and hope. These are the things they take with them on the journey; where a person has already been can be as important as where they're going.

As we teach our students how to divide decimals, conjugate verbs and summarize a thousand years of history in a single paragraph, we also are charged with teaching them how to view themselves as travelers, how to ride the highs and lows of their journey and how to say who they are and where they are going, should they ever find themselves lost.

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