Imagination is a luxury beyond the reach of many of my students.
My students are all adults and come from a variety of backgrounds. Many are impoverished with difficult pasts they appear eager to put firmly behind them. I try to imagine what challenges they have overcome to get here. Tackling the GED may be a far simpler test of their fortitude.
In a recent session with this brave lot I planned to teach cardinal directions and reinforce measuring distances by creating an imaginary village map complete with schools, parks, restaurants and grocery stores. The lesson was to work in groups using cardinal directions and distance measures to provide clear instructions for getting from point A to point B within their imaginary villages. I provided the blank street and block grids with the instruction, “Imagine a village in your mind and take a moment to provide it a name, name the streets and then place a school, a park, a restaurant and a grocery store on your block grids.” Every student started creating a map that was rooted in the local community with familiar businesses and street names, most trying to accurately recreate the neighborhoods on the maps provided. Even with some gentle nudges from me to envision an imaginary village, they all came back to mapping actual, local neighborhoods. It became apparent to me that I was asking them to do something that was not a regular part of their daily lives.
Though using real locations was perfectly fine for the lesson, it got me thinking about imagination and our ability to allow ourselves the opportunity to dream. Why was engaging one’s imagination for this exercise such a challenge for my students? Was imagination a luxury my students had learned to do without to just get through day to day living? If dreaming a future for oneself required imagination would this keep my students from those dreams for their own lives and for the lives of their children? Permission to imagine was not enough, it was as if they no longer knew how to do it. How did they abandon their imaginations and did this include their ability to dream?
We completed the lesson without the elaborately articulated fantasy villages I had envisioned but with real, familiar neighborhoods to which my students could relate. Though it took a bit longer in the setup stages, the lesson was a richer exercise as a result of the shared experiences and real world settings. We described what was northwest of the Safeway and determined that the length of a particular block was about the length of a football field, the results I was looking for through alternative means.
All was not lost by a limited engagement of imagination. They were here – they had dreams that were manifest in their presence in my classroom with the goal to complete their high school educations. I accepted this practicality and learned to see imagination in their motives.
Bravely they soldier on with feet firmly planted in reality.