esther's story

FRIDAY, Sept. 22: I took my kids outside for class, today -- it was cool and breezy with high, white, puffy clouds -- for an exercise in seeing and listening. I asked them to spend seven minutes in solitude, somewhere near the academic building just being quiet and observing and writing what they saw and heard. It wasn’t the first time I’ve done this with my classes. But, again, I was completely heartened by the results. It’s funny, or not, I suppose, that kids, today, don’t spend much quiet time, much time thinking or looking. They’re bombarded with all kinds of noise and captivated – or distracted – by all kinds of images. But when you slow them down, they do hear and see. Kitty Anderson saw dew drops sliding off leaves and, as she wrote, “crashing silently” to the ground. Pete Eggleston saw clouds move, or as he wrote, “slip slowly across the bluest sky I’ve ever seen.” Hiroshi Sumo, an international student from Japan, wrote about the “peace of a morning dotted with blood red flowers.” I saw a group of young people looking hard to see the world in which they live. The real world. It made me smile.