Johnny Appleseed...

On Johnny Appleseed...

When I think about Johnny Appleseed, one of the ideas I take from his story is his ability to do something for the future without an immediately measurable outcome.  Like the planter of any seed, Appleseed needed to take a giant leap of faith that a small kernel in the vast earth could years from then be something much more than that.  It's the ability to have faith in what could be even if you may not see the eventual outcome that allows us to be teachers.  Because I think that as much as we are driven by immediate returns--the daily successes we can see in children who are thriving or overcoming or moving forward in discernible ways--it is equally, and perhaps more, important to be driven by the notion that we are helping to nurture a future that might not be so readily or obviously connected to the present we deal with every day.

I suppose the pedagogical seeds I am pondering right now are related to whole-child education.  We are given the time to work with children who themselves are like seeds slowly taking root in the world.  We can support their growth by understanding that our ultimate hope is that they will grow into someone who flourishes and plants new seeds themselves.  To think that way is to think expansively about the project of being a teacher--and I think that's important.  It's not about a single tree--but about legions of trees.  It's not about one single season but about a lifetime's worth of growth from seed to sapling to something strong and resilient capable of meeting challenges and also bearing fruit.  We, as teachers, are simply one part of a process that is much bigger than us.  So we should always put our time spent with students into the context of the big picture of what we can do to foster a lifetime's worth of growth!