To start out I want to give you a few dots that I will connect in a minute.
Dot 1: This quote, “All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Dot 2: The metaphor “Life is a highway.”
Dot 3: My students’ view of life.
Dot 4: The windows in my car.
First, let’s expand Dot 2. If life is a highway than we must drive to get through life. Each one of us has our own “car.” We view life through our car windows. Which brings us to Dot 4, the windows in my car.
My driver side window fell into the door so I used packing tape to fill in for the window until I can get it fixed. The front window has a huge rock chip that sits just at the bottom of my line of vision. I can see out of both windows well enough to drive, but the view is skewed.
Dot 3. Everyday I hear, in some form, how much students dislike school, or that they don’t like to write, or they don’t like to read. I teach English. But also, everyday I learn more about the students’ fears and hurts of life. Reread Dot 1. But it is not just parents that create issues for students (or anyone). Just living life creates its fair share of damage to their windows, or view of life.
Let’s connect the dots. Everyone is on this highway, each driving their own car. A car with different degrees of damage to the windows. These damaged windows affect our view of life. This damage creates a challenge for us to overcome as we drive, so we cannot see that every driver is dealing with his or her own damaged windows as we go through each day.
At times the highway seems so dangerous, but it is not because we are bad drivers. If you really think about it, with all the different ways the windows become damaged, and how we make it through everyday, we are pretty skilled drivers. The way to make the highway safer is to focus on fixing the windows people view life through.
It is all Connected 