Gratitude, etc.

Tonight, I'm not going to blog about my musings on the meaning of gratitude. I know that somewhere, on land mass much larger than the one upon which I currently reside, people are beginning to say hello to a day on which they will sit around a table, stuff themselves stupid with opulent amounts of food, and watch football or It's a Wonderful Life on TV. But, apart from a few Thanksgiving lessons that I've given at elementary schools over the past month, that has little to do with me right now.

Tonight, as I huddle in front of the cool glow of my MacBook screen and the hot air from my oil heater, I don't really have anything special to say about gratitude. But I do want to talk about creativity. And maybe gratitude ties into that a bit in the end. We'll see.

This evening I made stuff. For starters, I made some pumpkin pies (OK! You got me: you can take the girl out of America but you can't take the America out of the girl). They're sitting on my kitchen counter right now and the festive aroma they're sending my way is delightful. While the pies were cooking, I made some lanterns out of recycled glass jars and hung them in the kitchen. They look sort of pretty, dangling there.

There's something flooringly spectacular about the fact that human beings are creative beings. We've got something in us that no other creatures on Earth have got. God put it in there. Every creative act that we perform has the potential to be worship and all worship is creation. Pretty exciting.

I was reading a recent blog post by Ashely and it got me thinking further about how an important aspect of my job as an educator -- perhaps even the most important aspect, is my role in encouraging students to think for themselves and push themselves to be more than they realize they have the potential to be. This can be fairly tough at times because junior high school students -- particularly junior high school students in Japan -- don't like to stand out too much; and standing out is very often a direct byproduct of thinking for oneself.

The situation isn't helped much by the fact that language education in Japan, in general, emphasizes rote memorization and repeating lines from the text book over and over and over again until you finally reach the point where your brain implodes on itself from sheer boredom. It's no wonder that when I try to get my students to put together original sentences in English, using vocabulary they've already learned, they freak out. "What? You actually want my to think for myself? You mean I can't just copy a sentence out of my textbook? It's too hard!"

But we can't settle for mediocrity because the alternative is too hard. We need to push ourselves to achieve a potential beyond what we already know to be attainable and we need to encourage others to do the same.

So how can I respond to this responsibility? How do I encourage my students to live up to their potential when all most of them want to do is blend into the crowd and slide through classes by doing the minimum amount of work and praying that they teacher won't call on them and make them look stupid in front of their friends?

I've learned that the most important thing I can do is laugh with them. In class, I'm ridiculous. When I read passages out of the textbook for the students to repeat after me, I do so in absurd voices. I use excessive gestures, dance, sing, and basically leave class every day knowing that I've left a little bit of my dignity somewhere inside and that I'll never be able to get it back.

Does this work? I think so. Or at least sometimes it does. There are a few students who are so painfully shy, it's likely that nothing I do will ever make them feel comfortable speaking English in class. But there are others who realize, even if they mess up when forming sentences in English, they can't possibly make themselves look any more ridiculous than I've already made myself.

Perhaps my acting silly has nothing to do with English-learning, directly. But it does have to do with encouraging people and loving them and making them feel valuable and empowered to try their best. And, as I've come to learn, that's really what my job is, anyway. I'm grateful for such a job.