Today was the first official day at Honeywell Space Academy for Educators. I’m feeling inspired beyond comprehension. I expected to learn about space travel, but I walked away thinking so deeply about the learning that takes place within the four walls of my classroom. I saw the clip today from the famous John F. Kennedy speech containing: “We don’t go to the moon because it is easy, we go because it is hard.” Not only do my students wear this quote on their class t-shirts, but these are words to live by.
I listened as astronaut Robert “Hoot” Gibson talked about his space travels. As he shared stories and spoke about his career, it was clear: He loves to fly. Flying is his passion. He told us about the first time he landed the Space Shuttle… on a runway… in the dark. I thought about teaching, about how there are times students want to shy away from difficulty. Maybe it’s fear of failure or an uncomfortable fear of the unknown, but it’s there. If it were your student landing the shuttle, what would you want them to do? I would hope they would embrace the challenge and know that everything worth doing is not always easy.
Just as an astronaut loves to fly and lives out their passion each and every mission, our kids need to experience struggles, successes, and failures. As teachers, we have to encourage them. Support them. Inspire them. Question them. Model failure and show them you can learn from it. Teach them to question. We need to provide challenging opportunities for learning and let them think like an astronaut: Embracing challenge on the darkest of life’s runways, coming in for a landing, and experiencing the victory of a completed mission.
