SOME REFLECTIONS BASED ON A WONDERFUL MOVIE : AWAKENINGS

This movie came to my life when I really needed to reflect on how beautiful or trivial can be life for people. It depends on how you face up it and the attitude you assume in front of the great and small things it has, but also, with some troubles we can find in our ways.  It is impossible not to feel touch by the history of this doctor, and of course, the life of his patient Leonard.  

You visualize yourself in the other side of the way looking at many students, who seem to be highlighted or abandoned by the society. Those children and adolescent who don´t keep on the standards that society impose to be considered as normal or well behaved. Those parameters, that we also as teachers use to identify if a student deserves to be taking into account or being considered as a “problem”,  when probably, we are the real obstacles for them. As human beings we are all different, no matter if we come from to the same family and had the same kind of education. We cannot be considered as a homogenous multitude, but sometimes   that´s the way we look at, teach, direct and evaluate them, as a group not as an individual. In fact, we are able to categorize them according to our desired categories, comparing who’s better than one, who finishes faster than the other, who comprehends easier, who brings, who does, who participates, and so on.  Our mind is limited because we establish those limits.

However, education is a right for everyone; it is not a privilege for some students considered as “intelligent” because they get good scores in an exam or can remember a lesson. It should be focused on those people who have some limitations for doing or performing certain kind of things.  For people who needs our help to understand the world but also to discover who they are and to feel proud of what makes them unique.

In many classrooms are students who don´t feel motivated to go to school for the great adventure of discovering knowledge, but interested in other things such as: having lunch, meeting people, playing with their friends, just for family pressure or because they want to escape from the sadness and violence of their homes. But, most of the times, we don´t go beyond of the formal relation of the teacher and the student- The relationship between the “wise” and the “unaware”, the “full of knowledge” and the “empty box”-; Our main role is not as transistors but as educators.

 We have one of the most (if it is not the most) amazing, powerful and important professions and it is our duty to assume a real commitment to help people to change their conceptions of the world towards a better life and relationship among humans and nature. The doctor asked in the movie: “what are those patients waiting for?” and I am now asking myself “what are my students waiting for?” and “what are other students waiting for?” our knowledge and efforts should be directed to do our job  better each day.

I remembered a comment made by a teacher during a teachers´ meeting, where there were assigned the directions of some projects to some teachers of the school. She said “I am here for dictating a class not for planning, orienting and carring out projects”. How wrong some teachers were when they chose their profession. We are in schools because we are privileged of helping others and we enjoy it, sharing the small things we know trough a meaningful process which must be constantly changing, not just for reaching what we want, or government desires or society imposes, but also recognizing each human being important and unique.  As doctor´s final reflection argues “The human experience is more powerful than any drug and that’s what needs to be nurtured”