Last week, I had the honor to sit and watch students stand up in front of a room full of adults and move us through the power of their words and expressions.
On Monday, we hosted our second annual Social Mobility Lab Summit at City College of New York. It is typical for events like these to bring in a keynote speaker whose expertise on the subject matter is nationally renowned. Marked by years of study and writing on the topic. We take a different approach and instead center student voices whose expertise in social mobility is drawn from their own remarkable lived experience. The words they share stem not from a New York Times best-seller but an essay they write in my class.
Please take a few minutes to watch this student share his story. I have little doubt you will be moved, inspired and impressed by the courage and wisdom this young man shares.
A few days after this event, I found myself in the audience watching a larger group of students perform a high school production of Grease. My oldest daughter played Sandy, one of the leads, and this would be her last high school theatrical performance. The show was fun, infectious and moving. Seeing your child put herself out there – at two different times performing solos in the most extreme sense as she was alone on the large stage singing songs that required great vulnerability – was such an amazing gift. At the same time it was incredibly bittersweet, realizing that this may be the last time I see her perform on a stage – an experience that has brought me such joy and pride over the years.
While the venues and the content of these two events were markedly different they shared a few common themes.
In both cases, the students – when finished – were lavished with praise while at the same time balancing the euphoria of a warm reception with the exhaustion that comes in the aftermath of putting yourself out there in such vulnerable ways.
Each situation also reflected the power of a transformative educational experience. In the first situation, a student was asked to share his story of “how he ended up here” – deeply internalizing classroom discussions about social mobility and what that has meant for his own life. In the latter, the cast and crew had six weeks to come together to stage a production, memorize lines, songs, dance moves, coordinate costume and set changes, arrange lighting and sound and a thousand other things necessary to stage a play. All this learning and hard work was done with such love and care.
Both situations are a testament to how important learning driven by intrinsic motivation is. Learning that is self-directed and personally meaningful. The process itself is the reward as it is marked by joy or self-discovery.
It is these types of experiences that students carry with them throughout their lives, far more than any grade or transcript.
It is perhaps most telling that after the last show of Grease as the cast and crew stood on stage, many if not most were in tears. Their tears were born from the realization that they were leaving something behind that they loved so much.
How wonderful it must have been to love something in school so much that you are moved to tears when it is over?
As an adult with my own schoolyard days in the distant past, last week filled me not with nostalgia but with hope. It is just absolutely beautiful and awe-inspiring to see what young people are capable of when motivated by their own desire to learn, putting themselves out there, and in doing so contributing to the joy and education of others.
This Week’s Recommendation. In the spirit of awe, please check out the latest episode of the podcast, The Science of Happiness. I was a guest on the show discussing an Awe Walk Through History and Possibility – a project we designed to take students on a tour through Harlem connecting historical stories of social mobility to their own lives.
Please share this with a student – of any age – in the hopes of sparking a conversation about the kind of learning they love.