When I was growing up dreaming was encouraged. As long as your dreams fit into the pre-planned box they were suppose to. Sure when I was 7 I wanted to be the unicorn from the Rainbow Bright series and I don't think anyone had a problem with that - as long as the unicorn went to college and became a veterinarian.
I don't want to make my parents sound like overzealous planners for me. They weren't. No one ever said "you can't". In fact I had parents and relatives who encouraged and supported my plans to become a writer, an actress, a singer, a lawyer. But it was also made clear to me that the path to all these dreams was a good education, a college degree and hard work. It never occurred to me NOT to go to college. And in fact I even went a year early - although more out of the desire to get OUT of Freeport then to actually GO anywhere.
But I think now, as I work with my students in NOLA about what my life would have been like if instead of just assuming college was in my future it was always assumed that it would not be. Would the dreams I had for myself had changed? Would I have found a way to Emerson College (or somewhere else that may have been a better fit) anyway? Or would I have sought out some different path. Maybe less tradition, but maybe that would have brought me a different kind of success.
The last few years have got me thinking a lot about how the dreams we have for ourselves - whether created by us or others - impact the decisions we make. Even as a child of divorce, coming to terms with the end of my own marriage made me feel like a failure. Because one of the dreams I had was to be a good wife and mother and suddenly it felt like a dream I could not achieve. Where did that I dream come from? My own desire to beat the odds after marrying too young? The dreams that other people had for me to achieve what they had (or had not) achieved?
And what of my students? Does my encouragement toward college somehow limit the dreams they have for themselves? Or does it simply provide a new avenue for them to dream about? Where is the line between what we think is the right path and what is the right path become blurred by our own experience, our own dreams. If my daughter came home engaged at 20 like I did would I be able to look beyond my own failed marriage and recognize her dream as independent from my failure? If my students do not do to college can I envision a successful life for them even though the only way I have measured success is though an education?
When we teach our children that they can be anything - even that unicorn from Rainbow Bright - we allow them to explore all who they are. And we must find the balance between support of those dreams, and allowing them to experience their own success and failures. I think some days it's enough that my students see me everyday. That they know I am going to be proud of them regardless of what they become - you know assuming they don't become gang members, drug dealers or incarcerated. But even then, they know that if there was a way to support them, that I would. They know that I see their education as more then what happens in math class or biology. That I seek out ways to engage their dreams and help them find the path they need to make it into a reality.
I gave my 6th graders an assignment yesterday to write and illustrate their own myth. Some students completed the project as quickly as they could. Some poured over the art because in part they liked it better and in part because writing anything is a challenge. Some wrote short stories that were barley myths and showed little effort. But one boy has sat quietly in class for two days and written. At the end of class today he had filled three pages with his story and when I came to collect it at the end of class he told me he wasn't done yet and could he please work on it again tomorrow. When I asked him if he wrote a lot he said with this small smile he had never written like this before. I could see in his face, in his eyes, the creation of some small new dream.
I think in the end that is my job. Create the opportunity for new dreams.
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