Stuff & Even More Stuff...

   

   Evan was headed to third grade, but his intensity and confidence made him seem much older. His Star Wars tennis shoes dangled from his seat, far from reaching the worn recreation center carpet.  Evan was finishing his first stop-motion film at my one-week after-school class and was giving his masterpiece a YouTube title. Call it, “from a guy named Dead Guts” he said. I put up a weak protest, but Evan’s eyes had it and I did not, so Dead Guts made it online.

      

   This group of loveable knuckleheads was reminding me why I loved teaching. They made me miss the classroom and wonder if retiring was a good idea. Evan’s second film was made with the same unstoppable focus and he called it “Stuff.” I didn’t bother trying to redirect him when he wanted to name his next two films, “More Stuff” and “Even More Stuff.” He seemed on a mission and impeding that seemed wrong and possibly futile.

    

    His dad dropped him off the first couple of days and I sensed the same strong drive in him, but with a bit of sadness. His teen sister also had a presence, although more subtle. There was no sibling teasing. She looked at her brother like with something I can only call motherly love. She cherished him. The sense of devotion was something no one would miss seeing.

      On the last day of class Evan arrived in his Batman shirt and made a crime-fighting film. I don’t recall what he named it. I was so taken by the fixation this little boy had on creating. He had no need for daydreaming, silliness, roughhousing or any of those wonderful job descriptions of a seven-year-old. He was very willing to take advice, but his eyes never left the scene he created from Legos and imagination. On the last day his Grandmother arrived to take him home and she opened the book on Evan for me. She said his mother died recently after being sick for several years.

        

  I miss teaching, because working with kids was a daily lesson for me that we just don’t know what is truly going on in people’s lives.  We create, we love and find so many other ways to cope with “stuff” and even more stuff that we all face. 

Some Good Stuff from Social Media...Really.

     Much of the media we purposefully or even accidentally ingest comes in innovative packaging and is different in many ways from the old media consumption model.  We have improved the technology and changed when, where and how we open our media portals. We may be “vaping” instead of “smoking” our information, but we should not fool ourselves that our media consumption is harmless. There will always be a concern with bias and a focus on the outlandish and the negative. 

   The Don Henley lyrics from 1982 that “it’s interesting when people die, give us dirty laundry” is as true about many news sources today as it was decades ago. But everything is not doom and gloom. Maybe the rapid news cycle and our ability to quickly spread a story can bring out the best in us too.

           

photo- CNN.com

  This week, fans from the University of Georgia, with a little amplification assistance from ESPN Sports Network, showed us how social media connections allow us to share the best of our humanity.  
   The Georgia Bulldogs football team played against Arkansas State University Red Wolves on Saturday. Coach Blake Anderson of Arkansas State lost his wife Wendy to breast cancer a month ago. Georgia fans welcomed the Red Wolves with a sea of Bulldog fans wearing pink shirts and holding supportive posters to celebrate the competitor’s wife and bring attention to breast cancer.  
     The fans shared the social media hashtag #WearPinkForWendy to spread the word leading up to the game and the Georgia fans did not disappoint. Coach Anderson of Arkansas State said, “I’ll be honest with you, I teared up, and it took a little while to kind of compose myself.”

           

  Another story to give us a much-needed boost in our faith in humanity started as a bullying event in a fourth-grade classroom in Florida. Students in that elementary classroom were encouraged to represent their favorite college by wearing their gear to class.  
   One student did not have an orange t-shirt for his beloved University of Tennessee Volunteers, so he drew a “U. of T.” design on a piece of paper and affixed it to his shirt with safety pins. He was bullied by classmates for his makeshift college gear. His teacher took to social media and told the sad story without naming the young boy. 
   The response from across the nation was overwhelming. The teacher hoped to get a few words of encouragement to share with the young student. She did. In addition, the boy’s design is now on t-shirts as official gear for the University of Tennessee. 
   The profits are being shared with the non-profit, “Stomp Out Bullying” and the fourth grader has been offered a full -ride scholarship to the University in 2028.

            The axiom that “bad news travels around the world before good news even has its shoes on” doesn’t have to always be true. Lies, damn lies, statistics and more will be used for dubious ends in our networked world.
    Truths, selflessness and integrity can also trend if we look to examples like the fans of the University of Georgia. We can also find hope in the thousands of kids and adults who responded to a single classroom bullying story and flipped the script to celebrate the innocence and creativity of children.