“Wisdom and Wonder,” Part II

I am one of those teachers who save student papers. Hmmm…’save’ may be too mild a verb here, it would be more accurate to say I horde student papers. You wouldn’t believe the files I have accumulated over the years of student work! It is all stuff I had graded, but I managed to deflect student awareness over 20 years so that I might squirrel away papers for posterity from the hundreds of students I have taught But last year on this day, I finally cleaned out my classroom at Hackley, packing up the treasures and detritus of over a decade in one place. Unfortunately, as I packed up the Penske truck last June 30, I discovered that I could not take all those files I had been saving over the course of three schools’ work. The truck was not the size of a fort. Yes, it was pretty traumatic as I realized I was going to have to part with, simply abandon, papers going back to the late 1980s. But the truck and the car could only hold so much.

So now that you know that odd character trait (flaw? eccentricity?) about me, it won’t surprise you a bit that I stowed away the final papers of my young scholars to bring back to the United States. I may have cast aside dozens of papers last June 30, but I now have the beginnings of a new gold mine.

The other day I showed you some examples from my 9th graders’ final papers on The Giver. Here are a few more examples of the kind of thinking and writing these pioneer KA students offered this last month:

Karim: We read the article this year that stated, “Faith will unsettle politics everywhere.” This phrase talks about how faith will always disagree with the people on control and in this case Jonas and the Chief Elders. How Jonas started to believe and wanting change and that was faith and that unsettled the politics as it broke every rule and created disorder and that was the point….I personally regret all the times that I wasted instead of aiming for my best….Having most of the knowledge and then figuring things out and that’s what’s similar to Mr. John and the Giver. They let us set our own path, not follow the trail.

Jadallah: These memories have joy in them, but it fears me to allow my kids to go through what I felt. But the pain turned out to be a relief at the end of the day. The pain that put me down, and weakened my soul at that moment, has made me the man I am, and has strengthened every positive side of me and allowed me to be in control and has been worth the journey.

Maya: The one thing that Jonas and I share together is the love of learning, and the desire, that eager wanting just like a dictator and his want of power—of an education, of a future, will take you places, and make you someone.

Yasamin: As I read the back cover of the book I thought it was going to be another pointless fiction book with no true meaning, nothing to do with history and certainly nothing to do with my life….[However!] There are many parts of this novel that were like moments in history….When all the memories came out they looked to the Giver for help, like in the Great Depression when the Germans looked to Hitler for help.

Reem: As Martin Luther King wrote, “Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which starts out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion.” This quote made me think about the book that we read in World History class….The thread that keeps the community together is “Sameness” and without this thread or if anyone wants to break that law they have to be “different” and most of the people would feel ashamed and won’t dare to be that way….One of the great historic figures that reminds me of Jonas…is Gandhi…Gandhi decides to take the path of “satyagraha” and it means the force of truth and it is no violence. This figure stood up against all opinions and achieved what he wanted without force.

Robert: [Rob re-writes the first paragraph of the novel amending all the references to Jonas with references about himself, showing a parallel to Jonas’ trajectory. Rob entitles his paper, “A Perpendicularly Parallel Life.”] We learn in the story about the glory of surprises, and that is the fun—they are surprises!

Hamzah: The Giver is a struggle of a boy with his own community, his own parents, and with his elders. Lois Lowry calls the main characters the Giver and the Receiver, but I see him as The Struggler, instead….The book says, “and still he did not understand.” It’s the same that happened to me when I became a student in KA. I was afraid, confused, I barely understood the teacher and what they wanted. Same for Jonas, he didn’t understand everything the Giver told him. However, when I spent more time with the teachers and in the school, I started to get everything right and completely understood what they wanted and how they wanted it….I stepped forward and said: I will take knowledge.

Thaer: Jonas’ discovery that all he used to be told are lies and his struggle to change his community reminds me of when the Soviet president Gorbachev cancelled the history exams in 1989 since all the textbooks were full of lies. Jonas’ discovery represents the historians’ further discoveries when they were allowed to look into the old Soviet files in the 1990s….Even our goal in history class is the same as what Jonas goes through—our goal is to feel what it is like to live in a certain era, and Jonas lived in those eras before Sameness and felt how life is there. My journey as a historian doesn’t differ from Jonas’—Jonas’ journey is crowned by a huge change in his community at the end….The capacity to see beyond is the most important characteristic required for a successful historian. Historians should be able to read between the lines and to speculate about the future. Another characteristic is to handle pain, and who says learning is not painful? However, if I handle the pain and insist on learning, like what Jonas did, I will be a successful historian able to change the world the way Jonas did….Like Jonas’ journey, in mine, I saw different colors in history class, and I have been experiencing beautiful events, such as the beginning of civilizations, the glory of Athens, and great moments of hope….What Jonas does after he knows the truth is what I’m trying to do; not to make people lie to each other and not to let history contain lies. Jonas succeeds in his journey, but will I succeed?

Raja: I look back at before I really became engaged with my history class and I realize that I was very silly, and quite stupid. Although I thought I was smart, and although I thought I was able to make wise decisions about things in my life, I really couldn’t….The equivalent of Jonas’ memories is the information I receive while in history class, the effect it has on me is similar to the effect of the memories on Jonas, astonishment, and then a sense of understanding. As I get information about things I am constantly reviewing it and analyzing it so I can understand….I love to analyze a moment in history. You first stare at it, more likely than not you are astonished by what is in front of you. Then you read through it, break it down, and then you put it all together to be able to make a statement about something. Jonas does all of this and his statement is clear….I think coming to KA in this day and age when there are so many problems, and so many more problems build behind closed gates that it is important for my generation to be able to know, to want and to be ready to make such decisions. If my generation does not look at things and make statements and make changes then it will be my generation and all the others after me that will suffer the consequences….When I understand, I too become a Giver….Looking back at the history of my student life that I never used to care about the knowledge about which I had little interest, however now I recognize the importance of all knowledge, especially the ones I find most boring because it means that I know the least about them.

Abdullah: We began the year in 1993, a year described by historian Howard Zinn as “in the summer of 1993, there is a general mood of despair.” However, I must protest, for in the summer of 1993 a small light of hope was born, and that light of hope was called Abdullah. The year is also the year of the birth of a very interesting book about a boy named Jonas. Throughout the 20th century mankind has made many of the stupidest mistakes it has made, and suffered, and still is, for them. These were made by stupid choices. What if one didn’t have to make these choices? How would the world be like if we didn’t have the curse/gift of making choices?....This Abdullah received a phone call that he had been accepted to attend KA—he would finally escape the usual memorization at school and actually have fun learning. He kept thinking about the courses he would take, and how they would be taught. He didn’t even think about History….The first lesson was longago and the only thing I remember is this: “Our goal in this course is to wonder how it felt like to stand in another historical era.” I didn’t quite understand that. The next week I remember Howard Zinn’s comment that, “I wanted to change the world, so I became a history teacher.” But I still didn’t understand, and I didn’t know it then, but Mr. John knew I didn’t….Jonas now sees the importance of questioning, of memories, of wisdom, of choices, and of history. He sees the reason the Chinese loved knowledge, and why Stalin only let people know what he wanted them to learn. He discovered that knowledge is the most powerful weapon, as I did this year.