The Danger of a Single Story

In one of our faculty orientation meetings this week, we watched the beginning of a TEDTalk that I just finished watching, called The Danger of a Single Story.

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

Nothing I could say to summarize Adichie's talk could come close to the charm and power with which she presented it, but the basic idea is that we have to guard against forming opinions and understandings based on a "single story". She talks about her roommate in college who could not fathom her experience as a basically middle class Nigerian, because her roommate had only a single story about Africa - one of extreme poverty and disease. She confessed to times when she herself was embarrassed by her own ability to believe a single story. Her words are definitely powerful.

As a teacher, I always need to be on guard for the single story. Students get reputations, and too often teachers walk into the classroom on the first day of school already having formed opinions about a number of kids in the class, based on the single story they have heard from a colleague. With our international student body, it is also very easy to make assumptions in a similar way. I teach advanced math classes. When I see a Korean student on my class list, I am often too quick to assume that this will be a driven kid for whom grades matter more than anything else. I have taught enough Korean students over the years to know that they are just as much individuals as all students are.

Adichie makes another point that really struck me while listening to the talk. When trying to understand somebody's story, we must start from the beginning. She gives multiple examples of how changing the starting point can change an entire story, such as starting with Native Americans firing arrows at settlers rather than starting with Europeans invading land that native tribes had inhabited for years. The same is true of our students. Especially in a boarding school where kids come from all over and we know very little of their pasts, teachers have a tendency to start our stories of students with the first day of school. It is impossible to truly understand what motivates that student without learning the 15 years of stories that came before. Obviously it is impossible to learn all of that about all of the students I work with, but it is critical that SOMEBODY does learn all of that about each student. Every student must feel that connection and must feel valued as a complete individual.

Adichie's talk made me think about the many advantages of boarding school and why I love this overwhelming life. When I taught day school, students WERE single stories for me. I saw them only in the classroom and as academic beings. I definitely tried to connect with them and see more than that single story, but when it came down to my official interaction with them, it was limited. In the boarding school environment, it is almost impossible to see a student as a single story. I teach them in the classroom, coach them on the soccer field, work with them on dorm, run into them while they're hanging out with their boyfriend or girlfriend on the weekend. I see them interact with my family and with the families of their classmates. I see how they choose to decorate their rooms and what music they listen to. I see them laugh, fight, celebrate, cry, and sometimes even mourn. Teenagers are the most complex of all of us, because they have SO many stories intersecting in their lives and they are trying so hard to figure out which ones to adopt as their own and how to begin writing novel stories of their own. As adults, we've usually settled into a few comfortable stories which give us rich and rewarding lives, but teenagers are still trying things out. No job could be more challenging or exciting than trying to help them do just that. As boarding school teachers, we are certainly teaching our academic subjects and trying to create new mathematicians, or scientists, or linguists, but most importantly, we are helping these amazing young people understand the stories that have brought them to this point, and helping them to become the authors of their own lives. I can't wait to get started again on Tuesday!