While Micah finishes taking his nap, I take Joel outside to play baseball. This time, though, he notices a lizard running up the cinder block wall. It's warm outside, about eighty degrees, so the reptiles seem to enjoy the change in weather. Joel notices a butterfly flutter past and says to me, "Daddy, slow down. Be still." After it leaves, he says again, "You have to stay still for it because it's beautiful and if you're moving, you'll miss it." On some level, I feel like I'm raising a mystic. It's not that he's an exceptional smart kid, but that he sees things differently (like probably every other three year old who hasn't been socialized into a specific mindset).
He walks over to the swingset and notices the spider web. "Daddy, look at this. Isn't it beautiful? The spider is ugly, but it makes beautiful webs. The butterfly is beautiful but it can't make anything." A few minutes later he asks if we should destroy the web so that we can play with the swings. It's a tough moral dilemma. He chooses to keep the web and then asks me, "Would you rather be a spider or a butterfly?"
I know he was being entirely literal, but the question has me thinking right now. If I mean internal beauty rather than outward appearance, I think I'd rather be a butterfly. I'd rather start out ugly, be transformed into something beautiful and live in my identity than accomplish something grand.
When I think of a "relevant" education in the Digital Age, I am not too interested in providing tools that will allow students to accomplish something gigantic. I don't really care if my students invent the next Google or work on the next human genome project. On some level, I want them to feel that they have created something beautiful, but a spiderweb is designed for death. I'm hoping they choose to create work that sustains life. What I really desire, though, is that they would be transformed, that they would find their identity and discover how to be authentic in a Digital Age.
Right now we're learning about globalization and reading The World Is Flat. Students are creating solutions for a town that has lost its identity in the midst of globalization. In many respects, they're analyzing their own barrio. Once Revlon and Motorola and a few other factories fled the Maryvale area of Phoenix, we've been left with the shells of empty Kleenex-box stores and the town is searching for a sense of meaning. Growing up in an era of digital whiplash, students feel disconnected and lost. It's a crazy dream, but I'm hoping Maryvale will spin a cocoon and find transformation.
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