Post-Modern Students

For those of you in my cohort who have been emailing me this week, you know that I promised the kids a lesson on the "miracle of oil being a lie" and the reason why. In the end I did a full jigsaw with sources from 4 places (Maccabees, Mai Chanukah, Al haNissim, Rambam) and asked the students to compare the versions.

They did a great job comparing, and talking about how the oil miracle only appears in 2 of the four versions, and any miracle at all is not present in more than 3. Then I asked them why. I wanted them to think about what might motivate each of these sources to tell the story differently. I hoped that reading the four stories would have peaked their interest and sense of linear-mess to wonder what the "real truth" was and why the other versions chose to tell it differently. After all, that bothered an awful lot of people in Pardes, HC and everywhere else I've been as an adult. In fact, we even wrote a paper on it last year.

There was an almost visible sigh in the room as every single one of them wrote "because there are different versions with different understandings and ways of interpreting the story based on their agendas". Wow, I thought. I totally underestimated how post-modern my 7th graders are. While us adults are busy looking for the "truth", post-modernity, with its multiplicity and varying narratives for everything, has come to town. The kids know that the answer is going to be in the layers and agendas because they've learned that from Gossip Girl. They don't wonder about what other people think and how their stories are different, because they have novels in multiple voices and movies that spell out characters' motivations. How much richer it is than the one dimension that we thought in when WE were in 7th grade.

Richer, maybe, but also less connected and emotionally attached. My students know that everyone has a way to tell their story, and no version compells them. They can pick and choose at will, so they often don't even bother. I was looking forward to the second lesson, the one where we talk about each story's history and motivation, but they're already bored. Of course they all have reasons, they tell me, and that means we don't have to take anything too seriously. Anyone can tell their story (just look at the rise in self-publishing, blogging, etc) so no one's story is more than a breeze in the hurricane of images that passes before their faces every day.

In short, they have so many more stories, they don't have to care too much, or even think too much, about any of them. I threw my lesson on multiple perspectives down the drain tonight, and am now wondering how I can make just one story, one moment, really and truly matter.