Equity Focused | Inquiry Driven | Problem-Based-Learning | Transformational Leadership

I grew up in the desert of Las Vegas. I took this picture on a trip home a few years ago, and it reminds me of the many ways the desert is beautiful. It’s wide and expansive with boulders that seem to have fallen out of the sky, dust for days, an oven-like temperature, and plants that brazenly dare the sun to bring it. Las Vegas’ desert is rimmed with mountains and the sky at sunset is so often visual fire, gripping fiercely on everything it can touch on the horizon.

Imagine if the only place you have ever seen in the world was the desert.

While it’s beautiful, you would miss out on the majesty of snow covered peaks in towering mountain ranges. You would miss the way that the ocean grabs at the edges of the land along the coast and the entirely different world beneath it. You would miss waterfalls in the rainforest and seas of grass that float above the Earth like a giant green blanket. This world is a great big place. It’s full of wonder and unexpected places, and just when you think you’ve learned it, something else comes along and catches you by surprise.

People are like that.

Think about your best friend. Why is it that years into the friendship, there are still things you are discovering about them? It’s because people are more than the first impression.

As a teacher, every year for more than a decade I have had classrooms full of people – tiny, still-figuring-out-how-to-grow-up-and-be-an-adult-one-day people. And if you are reading this, my guess is you are a teacher or have been a teacher or know someone close to you who is a teacher. As teachers, it is tremendously easy to categorize our “people” according to the first thing we see about them. And in the hustle of this profession it is even easier to let that first categorization be the one that sticks.

That’s where we make mistakes. That’s where I made a mistake.

I had a student who had been known for their antics, their attitude, and their “bad kid” behavior for years. This student had been labeled as one of the behavior problem kids at the school. There was an entire list of people this student couldn’t be in class with and another long list of accommodations to be provided to support their learning. On paper, this kid was the kid that was going to be the challenge. And they were registered to be in my class.

Like all new people that come into your life, this kid was learning me, and I was learning them. And like many of you know, the learning happens fast and furious to keep up with the pace of today’s modern classroom. In fact, this is where I made my mistake. In the hurried tempo of the day to day, I didn’t intentionally slow down to really learn this kid, and I allowed the assumptions I took from one piece of paper determine our entire existence in my class.

I realized my mistake the day this kid ate the dissection.

It was a flower. But still. And then after the kid covered it up, after my stern reprimand, after the trip together to the nurse to call poison control, and after many many tears shed, that’s when I saw this kid for more than the paper that had been following them through their elementary career.

This kid needed to be seen. They were struggling through learning their new normal with parents mired in a difficult separation. They were encumbered by learning disabilities that month by month set them further behind their peers because of their struggle to read and comprehend. And they didn’t want to be the center of attention when they were not understanding something because it made the difficulties they faced keeping up with the class all the more evident. This kid needed me to just slow down and try to understand them. And at two and a half months into the school year, I had failed.

I saw the surface level things about this kid the same way that a quick stop in the middle of the desert lets you see the stand out characteristics of the desert but not know about the whole world. And in my haste, I allowed my quick analysis of who this kid was structure my entire understanding. It takes more work, more perseverance, more patience, and more diligence to learn a person, especially when they are a kid-aged person who is still trying to learn themselves. But the world is a great big, beautiful place. Dare to adventure through it and see all the parts. They are surprisingly beautiful.

Author: Alexandra Laing