More Letting Go

Letting go is this wonderful concept…not so easily achieved. Not too long ago my daughter came home with a science project to design and build a musical instrument. The object of the exercise was to create an instrument that varied in pitch and volume. They had drawn up the plans at school and were to complete the building phase at home. This was not the first musical instrument my daughter has ever created and so she approached the project with a considerable amount of confidence. Her plans for a set of shakers were very well drawn, and when she sat down to work, she didn’t actually want any help from her mother.

When it became clear to me that she didn’t understand the difference between pitch and volume I felt compelled to become involved. Things went downhill from there. Both my husband and I tried to introduce ways in how to change the pitch between her two shakers, but could not find a way to get her to understand that it was okay to change her project when it wasn’t meeting the outcome. We tried to show her the difference. She climbed into bed crying. When I asked her what was wrong I was told that I wasn’t listening. She had made a plan and she just wanted to follow it. We let her finish the project on her own and she got 100%. I shook the shakers for quite some time, listening for a change in pitch between the two. Did the short shake, did the long shake, discovered a definitely change in tone and volume, but not pitch. One shaker had a little more rice in it, did that change the pitch ever so slightly? Perhaps…maybe…yes.

The challenge to “own” our learning isn’t a simple one, especially in a world of conflicting “right ways” of doing things. I try to move fluently back and forth between what is “essential learning” and the ambiguity of discovering meaning. There is a boy who wants to share his ideas and they flow all over the page willy nilly, so I try to find ways to guide the flow. “Why do I need to put in periods?” he asks me as we edit his work together. “Because I need a chance to breathe,” I tell him. “If there are no periods, I don’t have a chance to breath, take a rest, absorb the meaning.” “But this is a river!” he tells me, “I don’t want you to breathe.” We negotiate his river together and I try to instruct him when we need to breathe, he tries to tell me where we need to go. We end up laughing.