Writer Maria Popova, in her life’s work The Marginalian, introduces Marcus Aurelius—“[o]nce a heartbroken queer teenager raised by a single mother… then ruler of “Rome as the last of its Five Good Emperors”—with this:
All human lives are too various and alive with contradiction to be neatly classed into the categories in which we try to contain the chaos of life, and yet we spend so much of our own unclassifiable lives classing the lives of others.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/06/01/marcus-aurelius-meditations-kindness/?mc_cid=a9935843cf&mc_eid=0654cb1bc8
Thinking about students within this frame, I, as an educator, live this contradiction: teaching students to simultaneously embrace and navigate the chaos of life, to continuously come to understand themselves and the world better without reducing it, others, and themselves. While I grade their learning, performance, and growth, I can work deliberately to avoid reduction and, instead, cultivate growth and well-being with contradictions. A school, a classroom, and the individual student in front of me contain “lives… too various… to be neatly classed.” Of this, be—moment by moment—cognizant.
