Jorge arrived back at school from the four-day, sixth grade camping trip dressed like a girl. He had on a skirt and a blouse he had borrowed from one of his classmates, and he had a scarf covering his hair. When I or anyone else greeted him on his return he said: “I’m Emily.”
Most of the teachers and students who received this news greeted it with a response similar to mine: “Hi, Emily.”
I accompanied my “Hi, Emily,” with a bit of a smile, and I know of no one who made a big deal out of this potentially shocking news. The next day and for the next three weeks Emily came to school dressed like a girl and stuck to the story that she was a girl.
Then, as suddenly as she had appeared, Emily was gone. About three weeks after the trip, Jorge was Jorge again and business of education went on as usual. To my knowledge nobody reacted much to the return of Jorge, either.
Years later I saw Jorge’s mother in the supermarket. I told her this story—my side of the story, that is—and finished with the question: “Remember that?”
She said: “Remember that? Are you kidding? I was terrified.”
“I never knew you were terrified. You should have come to talk to me.”
“No. It was good. I remembered something you said at one of our parent meetings about ‘underreacting,’ and giving kids latitude to discover themselves, and I decided to wait and see. And you were right. Sure enough, everything turned out just fine. Jorge is going off to Oberlin this fall.”
“Well, that’s wonderful. Tell him ‘Hi’ and congratulations from me.”
Each of us has a unique genius, a guiding spirit, a calling, and an educator’s job is to lead that genius out into the world to function effectively and gracefully in it. For best results, children need to grow up in an environment that makes it safe to be the you-that-is-becoming. When home and school are both creating such an environment, we are in business.
The first question in a child’s mind on entering a new situation is “Will I measure up?” They want to know if those little, embarrassing things they are aware of in themselves will cause them problems in their new environment. And there are so many things children can be worried about: race, socio-economic status, looks, size, shape, athleticism, intelligence, and what they have already learned about their academic abilities. My vision of perfection in a school community is when everyone is out of the closet about everything: “I am a slow reader.” “I am a slow runner.” “I am a slow starter.” “I enjoy being a girl.”
Self-acceptance is critical, and for self-acceptance, the child needs acceptance. This seems like a basic principal—yet often children find themselves constantly second-guessing themselves at school—trying to fit in. The truth is that most of us can succeed with the deck we have been dealt. The only real inhibitors to success are those that undermine who we are—the inhibitors of the genius.
Identifying these inhibitors is not an easy matter, of course. How do we determine which undesirable traits or behaviors need to be addressed, which can be ignored because they will go away, and which ones are there to educate us? These are the essential questions of education. All the other things one needs to learn in school: reading, solving math problems, doing a project about heritage, designing and testing a hypothesis, hundreds of understandings, thousands of skills, tens of thousands of bits of knowledge, all of it hangs on the safe environment we create for children to be themselves in ever more creative ways.
From the Principal’s Office: Lessons on Learning, Life, and Parenting is published bi-monthly. Each column is written by Rick Ackerly, a distinguished educator with thirty years experience in middle and elementary school education, who is currently the Head of the Children’s Day School in San Francisco.
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