The other day I was listening to sports talk radio --; I think a lot of us have been listening to sports talk this week --; and I heard one of the talkers describe a Denver Broncos player (maybe Aqib Talib) as "a human Red Bull."
I hear things like that with a lot of different ears. The storyteller in me recognizes a brilliant metaphor, and laughs. The youth soccer coach in me, briefly, thinks about how useful it would be to give my players Red Bull before our games. Just kidding. Briefly.
But the first one of my personas that lent voice to thought was the teacher, who recognized the metaphor and said, "I bet that kid was a nightmare in fifth grade." A kid with an inexhaustible supply of energy is not likely to be a kid who is really good at sitting still during math class or to be patient waiting for the teacher to see their hand in the air.
But, what a gift! And, make no mistake, for a young man with athletic aspirations to have access to the energy to it takes to play basketball at recess, do races in gym class, and then still be ready to run through a three-hour football practice after school is a wonderful gift. Just, not one that is appropriate for all circumstances.
It brought to mind a meme my wife showed me last week. It was an unattributed quote that read, "Our generation is becoming so busy trying to prove that women can do what men can do that women are losing their uniqueness. Women weren't created to do everything a man can do. Women were created to do everything a man can't do." (That last thing, by the way, is a long list --; ask my wife). I pray that my girls hear that, and remember it every day.
For that matter, I pray that all children hear that message and remember it. It isn't just girls that are being told to be boys, or boys told to be girls --; little Bobby and Jill and Trey and Rissa are all being told on a constant basis that they all have to be just like each other. Our institutional message, whether it is intentionally delivered or not, through our standardized testing, curricula, discipline, and expectations, is that every little kid, regardless of where they are when they get to us, is that they will be roughly the same when they're done with our institutions.
And, in the process, that also means that some of those wonderful qualities which don't translate very well to our institutions --; like endless energy --; have to get "smoothed out," and equalized, perhaps even medicated. Academic gifts we're pretty good at dealing with, as long as they fit well into our existing course offerings. Well-disciplined kids, kind children, punctual and diligent kids we understand and love. But, not so much the odd, the imaginative, the energetic, the preoccupied --; they don't fit so well.
And, by the way, it may sound like I'm denigrating the public schools here. I'm not. Imagine what you would do, as an institution, who has been handed a set of rules by politicians hundreds of miles away, not enough money to accomplish those rules, and in your door on day one walks Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Johnny Depp, Yono Oko, Hillary Clinton and Thomas Aquinas. What schools and teachers do manage to accomplish is nothing short of miraculous.
What I would love is if we, as a society, learned to recognize that God has chosen to give each of us a different set of gifts and talents, and that all of them work together, somehow, to keep the whole thing working. There's no point in making everybody the same --; the world needs all of us, if for no other reason than to give us somebody to root for this Sunday.
from Lakewood Sentinel - Latest Stories http://lakewoodsentinel.comhttp://arvadapress.com/stories/Differences-do-not-equal-detriments,206368?branding=15
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