Week 6 Element Spotlight: CULTURE

In 2005, the late author, David Foster Wallace, delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College. It was entitled “This is Water.” (Google it and give it a listen; you won’t be disappointed!)

He starts by telling a story about fish swimming in a fishbowl. One fish floats by two others and asks them, “How’s the water today?” After the questioning fish swims away, one fish looks at the other and asks, “What’s water?”

Wallace use this story as an allegory for daily life as a working adult in today’s fast-paced, consumer-driven society, but the major message is an important one — the boring, mundane things that surround us, which so often go unnoticed, are the things that life is made up of. And we must choose how we respond to these things. We can choose to ignore them, or we can choose to resent them, or we can choose to be aware of what it is that surrounds us and view it consciously, productively, and happily.

The same can be said of the CULTURE in our classrooms. It’s hard to define a classroom’s culture, but it’s easy to experience it. This is water.

Spend even a little bit of time in a classroom as an outside observer and all you can see is the water that surrounds every student, every action, every moment. But exist within a classroom’s culture day-in and day-out, like a teacher, and it’s easy to lose awareness of the water. Swimming through your day never noticing the constant presence of the culture around you, for better or worse. This is CULTURE.

The truth of the matter is that we create the cultural water of our classrooms. And if we don’t actively create it, the classroom will fill with cultural water anyways, whether we like it or not.

This week, ask yourself, “How’s the water today?” If you don’t like it, it’s within your power to change it.