Border crossing

I once had a conversation with a lively nun named Sister Ann, who looked me in the eye and told me, “Learning is about living with your cup half-full. The experiences you share with others fill it, but sometimes you have to let go of some of yourself to have room for it all.” For me, border crossing is this form of kinetic learning. It’s the kind of process that leaves bruises, memories, and dirt under your nails. Personally, I have been able to define border crossing more clearly as I have learned to rock climb. Both border crossing and rock climbing approach challenges holistically and horizontally. Perhaps the principles shared by rock climbing and border crossing provide a solution to the problem I see in education today: a system that trains its students to be so success-driven that we have forgotten to exist flexibly in our own learning processes.

My first time rock climbing, I stared at the wall for six minutes of eternity. I couldn’t stop the tangled knot of thoughts that yanked at my shaking legs (abortabortabort), or my weak hands (you’re crazy, you’re not as good as everyone else; gogogogo). I made eye contact with my belayer and then I made the first jump for a hold. Missing it, I swung out from the rock face in a wide arc like a lost spider. Weighed down by self-doubt and a misplaced sense of achievement (reaching the top) I missed the point of this first excursion: to learn the art of outdoor climbing, which has more nuances than what most people assume.

An outdoor climbing route, as opposed to an indoor one, is largely ambiguous. An indoor route is often color-coded and tells the climber where they should grab and hold. By the nature of being outdoors, climbing on a rock face uses adaptive movement, has to be more ...

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...osely tied to the adaptive process of outdoor climbing. By training students to critically evaluate the next step, I think that the Woolman School allows for more space for student success, and less room for paralysis.

And finally, the crux of it all is that rock climbing and border crossing share common principles that are transferable solutions to the paralysis of my generation. For us the ultimate challenge is unlearning our “hoop jumping” philosophy, a cup full mentality that prevents us from leaving the ground. In this sense, I believe that the current educational system has conditioned my generation to think of learning as a series of obstacles and fill-in-the-blank tests, rather than a constantly evolving process. A change in the pedagogy could lead to enhanced learning, unencumbered by the fear of failure, and well-improved by an adaptive learning process.