Of Pups, Faith, and DNA

Seventh graders. They’re like pups, bounding into the room, nipping and bouncing and if they only had tails, they’d be wagging them. Yet, they can transform that energy into incredible insights, clear thinking, and respectful dialogue. They may be like pups, but they want to know. They have big questions. If only that energy can be channeled.

Relate to their lives. The writing prompt yesterday was “Explain how an ipod works.” They all wanted more guidance, but I didn’t give in. Some made up stories about little people inside that played tiny instruments and ran around frantically finding selections for you. Others made a valiant effort to connect memory chips with LCD displays and explain what they could about binary coding. It was entertaining to hear some of the ‘theories’, and indeed, it was quite clear that no one in the room could really explain exactly how that amazing little device works. Extending this further, we could all agree that there is a lot in our world that we believe will work for us, even though we don’t know how many things actually operate.

Then someone popped the F-word, Faith. Can we actually believe in something, have faith in it, and still not understand it? It was good stuff. During the last 10 minutes of class, we wrote again, and I explained the homework. Before you go home today, talk to someone in this class, at lunch, study hall, or wherever, and write madly to fill up a solid page about our class conversation today. Use your second write in class as a starting point.

This morning the pups shared their thinking (that came from the one page think/write homework assignment) with others at their table. They decided whether they wanted to share with the class, and I took notes on the board. What a fascinating and uplifting discussion we had. I tried to capture the essence of what some were saying, with my notion of where I wanted the conversation to go as well. All over the board, we seemed to find belief and knowledge. Yet there was a gap between them. What was that gap? The F-word again. Faith. The Leap of Faith! Oh! They seemed to understand! It’s not like you’re committing suicide by having faith. You're filling in the gaps. It’s not a cliff you’re jumping off of, it’s like a gorge (only in Ithaca) we leap to get to the other side!

Finally, I showed them the clip of a video, in which a geneticist meets with Navajo elders to share their perspectives of human origins. In it, one of the Navaho elders eloquently defends his ancestral beliefs even in the face of scientific proof to the contrary.

We’re going to take a look at Native American creation stories. At this place where scientific evidence of a DNA trail leading all humans back to Africa intersects and Native Americans’ strongly held beliefs of their origins, my pups are ready.