We arrived home from visiting family in Minnesota late Sunday night (awesome visit, by the way... there was Play-Doh, painting, puzzles, manicures, and even some interpretive dance. Because every child needs me to teach them "The Sprinkler"). Monday morning had me heading to the school for a week-long course/conference on Project-Based Learning (PBL).
Rather than tell you about it, I thought what I might do is post the reflection that I shared with my fellow staff and the admin team at the school today. We had to reflect on our experience throughout the week and touch on the project that we designed. The pictures below were ones that I had on a slide in the background while presenting. Here it is:
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| The harsh beauty of the North |
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| I'm the cute munchkin bending over on the snow drift. |
Welcome to Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, land of tundra, -100 with
wind chill weather, and whiteouts. It
was also my home when I was 4 and 5. Now
Rankin was tundra. That means no trees
and no wind blocks. So in the middle of
winter when it started to blow you had crazy cold mixed with brutal
whiteouts. It was not uncommon for
someone who had grown up in the town to get lost in a whiteout, end up wandering out of the community, and freezing to death. When I was sick my Dad had to take me to the
nursing station. He loaded me onto our
sled and proceeded to pull my five year old body through blowing winds. One moment this was going smoothly, and the
next my Dad’s arm was up in the air with the sled while the wind was blowing me
back down the road. One of my strongest
memories of living there is of walking to kindergarten with my Mom. She had a special parka that had ties around
her waist. In these conditions my job
was to hold onto those ties for all I was worth so that I didn’t blow away
(which had happened to me before) and so that I didn’t get lost. That was how I got through the storm. That was how I muddled through the confusion.
On Day 1 of the Academy we were told to just live in the
confusion. If you get to know me you
will discover that I don’t like that.
When I am confused I am driven to get through it as quickly as I
can. I cannot rest until I have done
that. In my mind, resting or living in
confusion means you get lost. And
getting lost is the equivalent of dying on the frozen tundra.
I also came into the Academy with plans for creating a great
overarching summative project for my Grade 10 Applied English course. Watching everyone talk about the big projects
they had completed made me feel like mine had to be big too. And this overwhelmed me. I felt like I was floundering. Nothing was coming together and by the end of
the day I had scrapped this idea of a big project and thought I would just look
for a way to make poetry interesting to a group of 15 year old boys.
When I went home that night I was exhausted and my gut
reaction was to sit down and drill out the question and details for my
project. But I kept hearing Harry saying
“Live in the confusion.”
So for one of the first times ever I made the conscientious
decision to live in it. I kept it in the back of my mind but allowed myself to
just rest that night.
The next day I started talking to a few people and began to
develop the idea of using slam poetry to have my students combat
injustice. The literature in this course
deals a lot with issues of racism and discrimination, and I could see students
picking an injustice they are passionate about, and being able to express their
frustration and passion. I saw us
looking at the idea of righteous anger and addressing issues of social justice. It was something I could see them getting
passionate about. We did protocols and
with feedback I began to see my audience growing from peers, staff, and
parents, to a competition at a school assembly and maybe even presentations of
their poems at downtown coffee shops. I
started to get excited. I began
wondering if I could find a local poet to come in as my entry event. I started contemplating what videos I could
use to grab their interest. It felt like
everything was starting to come together.
Have you ever noticed that sometimes you feel you have
learned a lesson God is trying to teach you, only to have Him teach it to you
again and again in different contexts?
Welcome to the story of my life.
Part way through the week there was a dialogue regarding
this specific English class, and as a result it was switched around and I was
given a different class.
So there’s me, midway through the Academy week, working to
develop a project for a course that I am no longer teaching. At first I was
scared. What should I do? Should I scrap it and pick something
completely different for a different course to go with?
I talked with some people and we decided that I should just
keep going with the project. Aaron was
also very excited about this as he was the one now teaching that course! And on my own time I have been using the
skills I have learned this week to start working on a project for one of my
other classes.
Living in the chaos and confusion. It is not easy, and I don’t know if it ever
is. But what I noticed this week is that
I am not alone. No matter what stage of
confusion I was in, whether it was the ideas, planning, or adjusting phase,
there were people I could talk to. I
love collaboration, yet often try to do things on my own due to a mixture of
reasons. I can be insecure but I also
hate bother others. But we need each
other. Sometimes I get so muddled in the
chaos that I need someone to run after me so that I don’t get blown away, like
my Dad rescuing me from the wind. And
other times I just need people to walk alongside me, so that we can both help
each other along, like with my Mom in the midst of the whiteout. Sometimes it takes time for God to end a
whiteout, and sometimes it takes time for confusion to become clear. But I learned this week that I can rest in
those times, because there are others who are going through it with me. And by
the grace of God, we can support each other and get through that.
I guess the reason I wanted to share this with you, is because I know that most of us can understand that feeling of not knowing what is going on around us. Of feeling like we are living in a constant state of confusion, asking God "When is this going to become clear?" I wish I could tell you that your whiteout was only going to last a few hours, a day, or maybe the season of winter. But I can't do that. A whiteout could last only that long... or it could be years. If we are being really honest, sometimes it can last a lifetime and we may not get the clarity we seek until Eternity.
But I don't want you take that as something depressing (as hard as I know that can be). One thing that really struck me this week is the connection I felt with the staff at my school. I saw myself forming not just working relationships, but also friendships with multiple people. And that means I'm not alone.
You're not alone either. Cling to those people that God has placed in your life. Sometimes you might be rolling away into the storm and they will be the ones to grab by the fur of your parka (metaphorically speaking, that is), and yank you back to the present. Or maybe they will be the ones that you hold to in the whiteout, taking baby steps forward as you make your way through together. God created us to be community, and part of being in community means being there for each other.
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