While visiting Jeanette’s office at Pearce Middle School today, Diego logged on to one of the computers and started work on his first ever research project – a PowerPoint slide show on snakes and reptiles. It’s so wonderful to see my son searching for new knowledge. It reminds me of when I traced all the pictures from my Human Systems book using colored pencils to detail veins, arteries, muscles and bones. I was so intensely into that work, because it was self-directed. I’m sure part of the motivation came from the thought of pleasing my parents, but most was born of the fact that it was my project and no one else’s.
It humbles me now to think that project could have been a turning point, had anyone noticed how excited I’d been by it. Who knows what I might have done with my life? I might have become a doctor, like my Harrison classmates, Steven Drexler and Mark Hirschorn. Or, like my best friend, Miki Kasai, I could have ended up a medical researcher.
Sadly, however, no science teacher ever took note of my little independent flip book on human systems. To be fair, if I were to see it today, through my more sophisticated and world-weary eyes, the thing might have inspired a shrug at best.
But maybe not. As a teacher, I came to realize that there is no such thing as a “small” accomplishment to a child. If one of my students finally got it together enough to write a short story with a beginning, middle and an end, after having struggled to get even that far, I would celebrate the achievement, with great fanfare, before getting down to critiquing the details of spelling, syntax, grammar and the like.
And now I am celebrating Diego Fuchs’s first ever research project, “Snakes and Reptiles: Our Scaly Friends,” as if it were a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of journalistic reportage.
And who’s to say that it might not one day lead him to one?
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