Shifting Focus

Remember those 3-D Magic Eye posters? You know, the ones that everyone was going crazy about because they could see a panda riding a unicycle or something in the midst of the weirdo colors and designs, and you lied and said you could see it too?

Yeah. Those.

It is really easy to look at them and see the wavy lines, the different colors, and the crazy designs. It is tempting to count lines, colors, and patterns. You can describe a lot and spend an awful lot of time and energy looking at the surface.

But if you take your time, and completely change how and where you are focussed, all those lines, colors, and designs come together to show an incredible image. You are then able to see what was intended.

I think education is very similar.

I know from my own experience, though it pains me to admit it, that when I focus on teaching rather than learning, I miss the point. When I focus on delivery of content, tests, grades, checking off boxes, what's happening in other classrooms, fitting things into neat boxes that we label "Education," I get bogged down and completely miss the opportunity to see the amazing things that are right in front of me.

But when I focus on learning, I see a completely different picture. With the 3-D posters, all those lines, colors, and designs are still visible, but their purpose, their reason for existence, is to create an image that literally jumps out at you. The classroom is the same. Those things that take up so much of our time and focus, like curriculum, tests, grades, and all the other "stuff" (word chosen quite carefully by the way) should exist only to give us an image of learning. I believe that they are not meant to be our focus.

If for no other reason, they are just simply not as beautiful as the image of a student engaged in learning.

Just as there were times when I, for whatever reason, couldn't shift my eyes to see that panda on the unicycle, there have been and are times when I focus more on the teaching than the learning. It kills me to admit that even this year I have experienced times when my focus was all wrong. Usually it was in a moment of uncertainty, or fear, or doubt, when I freaked out and listened to some of the negative voices floating on the air around me, and the beautiful image of my students learning vanished. All it took was something drawing my attention from the real point of education (learning, right?) for just a moment, and I lost the whole image.

My struggle right now is holding back my frustration with those things that take my focus away from learning. That may be systems, requirements, schedules, people, philosophies. Anything that causes me to lose that beautiful image of learning. I am angry. I am frustrated.

But I am hopeful. And I just want to block everything out that doesn't matter and focus on the beautiful image that became so clear this year, of a group of students completely absorbed in their learning. I want that image to guide me, to inspire me, to challenge me.

I want to commit to keeping my focus on relevant, authentic, engaging learning, even in the midst of everything that competes for my focus.

Join me?