Does every student have to change the world? Depends upon how you look at what that truly means.
This quote, from one of my favourite songs of 2016, “Growing Up”, by Macklemore and Lewis, stopped me in my tracks:
Powerful words that should make every educator pause when we think about our kids “changing the world”. What does that truly mean and what does it look like for each of the learners we serve?
Quotes like this remind me of the importance of those “passion projects” that we do in schools, such as Genius Hour or Innovation Week, and how they serve something that goes beyond schools. I believe that there is a balance that we need to continuously try to figure out where we teach students things for their long term good, while tapping into their passions. Not everything in learning is awesome, but it shouldn’t all be mundane either. There are things that I wished I learned when I was younger that I hated, but never had the push to do so. It is not about only finding the passions of our students, but understanding tapping into these wants and passions, does create something pretty special in our schools.
That being said, I encounter people every single day, who do their jobs with passion and love, and I always look up to them. It does not matter what they do, as much as how they do it.
Specifically, I remember after an extremely long day, dealing with someone who worked in retail, and after just a 3 minute interaction, they made me feel like a million bucks in their attitude and their passions. Their job wouldn’t have been perceived as life-changing, but the way they did it, said something else.
There are so many ways we can “change the world”; sometimes it just means having a positive impact on those that we encounter each day, no matter what we do.
