Catherine Gobron
I have a sign language turtle who communicates through telepathy.
I should clarify that the turtle is not alive. Nor does it actually know sign language. It is sign language. (One hand over the top of the other becomes the shell, and the wiggling thumb becomes the head.) The telepathy, however, is quite reliable.
The turtle has a few rules. It only says things that are kind, encouraging, hopeful, and true. Beyond that, you can hear whatever you want in your own head. If you hear something unkind, that’s your own story. The turtle would never.
I bring the turtle out for a young person I work with who has a very hard time in the world. Sometimes things are so difficult for her that she thinks she might rather not be in the world at all.
Fortunately, she is still young enough that she can’t always help laughing at ridiculous things.
And for her I am willing to be ridiculous.
This may surprise people who know me. I am not, by nature, an especially silly person. I tend toward seriousness, somewhat unfortunately. I am a hard worker. I take my responsibilities seriously. I have spent much of my life trying to build things, improve things, solve problems, and get things right.
I have high expectations. For myself, for the people I work with, and for the young people we serve.
We have important work to do! There are things to accomplish! Skills to develop! Problems to solve! We have to do a good job! The stakes are high! There’s not enough money! It’s serious! Now! Quick!
Exhausting.
But when I’m with this particular young person, I have to get on the other side of the canoe, or we will surely sink.
She is already hanging off the side of a cliff by her pinky, with a team of mental health professionals at attention. She does not need me standing above her with a clipboard, explaining the importance of developing upper body strength.
She needs something else.
So I make inanimate objects talk to each other. I translate the turtle’s telepathic messages. I engage in extended conversations of absolutely no educational value whatsoever.
Except, of course, that they have enormous educational value.
Because sometimes she laughs. And sometimes the laughter gives her a little room to breathe. And sometimes, riding that wave, she finds her way back into the curiosity and brilliance and playfulness that belong to her, but can sometimes be hard to access.
And sometimes I find my way back to those things, too.
I think a lot about what we owe young people.
At LightHouse, many of the students we work with have had unpleasant experiences in conventional schools. Some have spent years feeling unsuccessful, inadequate, bored, alienated, or simply miserable in places that were supposed to help them learn.
Some are high achievers. But unhappy or unsatisfied. Others arrive with significant academic gaps.
These gaps matter, of course.
We need to understand what young people know and what they don’t know. We need to help them develop literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, and the many other skills that will help them navigate their lives. Assessments can be useful. Academic expectations are important.
I believe all of this.
I also believe that if a young person has spent years learning to hate school, our first move probably shouldn’t be to recreate the experiences that taught them to hate it.
This may seem obvious, written directly like that.
And yet.
We adults are quite good at getting tangled up in our own good intentions. We know young people need skills, so we focus on skills. We know they need to make progress, so we measure progress. We know time is passing, so we become urgent.
Urgency has a way of sucking the fun out of a room.
I know this because I do it myself.
I want things to work. I want our students to succeed. I want us to be excellent at what we do. Sometimes I can feel myself gripping my hopes for our students so tightly that there’s hardly room for anything unexpected to happen.
As though I already know what success looks like. As though the young person’s job is to figure out what answer I’m hoping for and deliver it.
Which is a pretty limited idea of education, when you think about it. And an astonishing amount of confidence in my own ability to predict the future.
Another young person came to us several years ago almost completely shut down.
He was virtually silent and constantly in motion. Connecting with him felt like standing beside a merry-go-round, waving with authentic excitement every time he came around.
Hello! So glad you’re here! And around he’d go again.
Eventually, he began to engage with us, although not always in ways we particularly appreciated. There was a period of truly difficult, destructive behavior. He could be a big jerk.
We kept loving him anyway.
Not because the behavior was acceptable. It wasn’t. Not because we didn’t have expectations. We did.
But because we could see that he was a person worth knowing, even when he was making himself exceptionally difficult to know.
Several years later, he cares about his life. He is a capable young man in the world.
His journey involved considerably less turtle telepathy. None, actually. The turtle would not have gone over well with him. But his journey did require a similar willingness to set aside our preferred timeline and respond to the person who was actually in front of us.
We couldn't demand that he start from somewhere he wasn't.
We can only start where we are. And keep waving.
There's no way to know if it will work. There are so many variables. But with each of these young people, and with all of the young people we serve at LightHouse, we do already know what didn't work. So the only sane option is something different.
There is a difference between having high expectations and holding those expectations too tightly.
We want young people to learn. We want them to grow. We want them to develop skills and confidence and the capacity to make meaningful choices about their lives.
But surely we also want them to surprise us.
To become interested in something we never imagined they’d care about. To discover a talent nobody knew was there. To find their way into learning through a door we hadn’t thought to open.
To do something completely ridiculous that turns out to be wonderful.
Expectations that leave room for discovery, imagination, individuality, and surprise.
High expectations, loosely held.
This is harder than it sounds. Especially when we care a great deal. Especially when the stakes are high. Especially when a young person is struggling and we are frightened for them.
It’s understandable to respond by becoming more serious. More determined. More insistent. But sometimes what a young person needs most is for us to loosen up. And sometimes that’s what we need, too.
I suspect most people who choose to become educators can hear the telepathic turtle.
We enter this work because we see possibility in young people. Because we believe in curiosity and discovery and growth. Because we want to be part of something hopeful.
Then life gets complicated. There are schedules and standards and deadlines and benchmarks and budgets and tests and paperwork and a thousand very real responsibilities. None of these things are inherently bad. Some are essential. But they can become so loud that we forget to listen.
The kid who has something funny to say. The unexpected question. The small moment of connection. The possibility that today might go somewhere entirely different from where we planned.
And the possibility that we might learn something, too.
I don’t want to suggest that silliness is the answer to everything. It isn’t. Some young people need quiet. Some need space. All of them, I think, need us to keep showing up, day after day, while they figure out whether they can trust us.
But I do wonder whether we’ve made the business of growing up, and the business of helping young people grow up, altogether too grim.
The world is a serious place right now. There are plenty of reasons to worry about the future.
All the more reason, perhaps, to make room for delight. For laughter. For curiosity. For the possibility that something wonderful might happen that we couldn’t possibly have planned.
I’m working on this myself. I would like to live a little more loosely. To be less preoccupied with getting everything right. To spend more time enjoying the extraordinary. More time living.
Fortunately, I have some excellent teachers. One of them is a young person who sometimes needs me to be very silly, and one of them is a turtle.
The turtle, incidentally, has extremely high standards. It only says things that are kind, encouraging, hopeful, and true.
But it never insists on the right answer.