Today I introduced the 8th grade to Erickson's theory of psychosocial development. After going through the 8 stages we were going to play a "charades" game where 2 people from a team were to try to wordlessly act out the conflict and their team was to try and guess the stage. We ran out of time for charades.
This blog is in some ways my attempt to struggle through resolving the stage of "generativity vs stagnation" and move me toward finding "integrity" in my life. I can easily paint the broad brush stroke of a 35 year career teaching children as a life with a giving focus. In that big picture there are the impressionistic dots of meaningless tests, forcing kids (who much rather be at recess) to pay attention to some bit of "knowledge" they won't recall after they leave the room, worthless assignments, work for work sake, teaching for the vacations, choices to teach kids of priviledge in private schools, ...
How many dark dots paint a picture of despair? How many bright dots paint integrity?
Today I've had 23 eighth grader dots thoughtfully considering the subconscious factors that might be driving the decisions they make about who they become - and 16 seventh grader dots silently willing me to set them free from a PowerPoint on their Linnaeus classification, so they can go to recess.
Net result - 7 brightly colored integrity dots in the picture of my life? Somehow I don't think it is going to end up working that way.
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