An Educator's Perspective

Last night my wife asked me what the book I was reading was about, so I gave her a rough sketch of it up to that point - it was The Face of Battle by John Keegan - and that started a discussion about what we like to read and why. I mentioned that what Keegan thus far was looking at how war was treated by historians, even including examples of cold stark fact accounts of battle and very colorful excerpts as well.

I like to know the facts, the big picture, and then fill in the details of who did what later. The why piece is also interesting to me, but again it is the big picture 'why' rather than the individual. After I know what happened, where it happened, when it happened, and who did what, then I like to find out about the people - the stories behind their lives and the many individual stories that lead those individuals to that point in time.

My wife likes to peel away the layers of a person and understand the person and why that person did what they did, and finds that to be more interesting than what happened as a result. She has a wonderful ability to see multiple sides of every issue, and that is an ability I wish I could develop more. She talked about having trouble getting beyond seeing the trees, while I usually see the forest and don't notice the trees much. She talked about how she likes that Carol Shields writes about small, seemingly insignificant things but writes them so that the reader understands exactly what the individual is doing, feeling, and thinking about their situation. To her, understanding the layers that make up a person - and removing those layers one at a time - is most rewarding.

My wife also made an interesting observation that perhaps the reason history was not so compelling to her was simply that history is usually about the big picture, full of details, and that there are no compelling stories about why the person did what they did to attract her. That, in addition to the fact that a lot of history deals with the actions of men and not women, may be the reason she doesn't have a great interest in history. She remembers vividly reading about Johnny Tremaine and his live and actions - that is how she learned about the Revolutionary War - because it was at the individual level.

Certainly everyone has layers, some more than others, but it takes time and effort to reveal those underlying layers. Maybe we need to spend the time to understand one another more as individuals rather than as a group, a society, or a nation. Everyone matters, as my wife said, and I know that to be true, but I have to work to get to that level rather than the larger group. Most of my efforts as a school administrator and my hopes eventually as a policy maker deal with improving schooling en masse, not at the individual level.