“Maybe stories are just data with a soul.”

Brene Brown

Learning as a data game.  Kids are just numbers.  The very thing that makes us human is reduced to a simplistic system of endpoints that either end in a gold star A or a giant red F stamped for fail.  Working within a system that could be planned, plotted, graphed, and fit in neat little bubbles and boxes.  Bubbles to reduce you to a rating. The amount of work taken to sustain it all eventually sucks the joy from the soul until there is nothing left. Until it’s no longer about learning at all.

Then, empathy walks in.

It’s messy. Unpredictable. Humans are.  There’s no number to put to it. There’s no score to attach.  There is only feeling, connecting, and being human.  It gets uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and isn’t written in a lesson plan.  It’s raw, unstandardized, and it’s going to take kids to a level where their thinking is more about changing the world than changing a score.  Because in creating solutions, solving problems, and designing ideas that make someone else’s life better, and that person is a real person, a person with a heart and soul… we bring the joy back to learning.

I don’t know why or how joy got separated from learning in the first place. I only know the path back to it. Empathy. It won’t be easy, pretty, simplistic, or fit in a neat little guide from the shelf.   You will fall, hurt, disappoint, change, and face facts that uproot your thinking.  But, it will be worth it.  Because, joy.

Don’t wait for empathy to knock on your classroom door, because it won’t.

Invite empathy in.