This video below touched my heart and my brain, made me feel and made me think. It is an excerpt from an award-winning documentary recently made available on youtube. Every teacher should see it. Every parent should see it.
What can a teacher do? What can a teacher be? What are the possibilities of that child-teacher relationship? And what, in the end, are we really teaching?
One approach: How to live a happy life, how to care for other people.
You have to love the answer after he asks the students, “What’s the most important thing for this year?”
All five parts of this 2003 documentary are now available for viewing on youtube. Below is part one, a clip that’s almost ten minutes. But I promise: It deserves your time. Trust me on this one.
ABOUT THE DOCUMENTARY
Here’s some info from CBCNEWSWORLD. For the full text, click here:
In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates.
Capturing the intimate moments of the students’ laughter and tears, the film explores one teacher’s approach to allowing children the opportunity to discover the value of sharing powerful emotions. Classroom discussions include difficult issues such as the death of a parent or being the victim of bullying. In this “school of life,” the simple message is learning to look after one another.
Following Mr. Kanamori’s class for a whole school year, the cameras were kept at the children’s eye-level, giving their view of the world as they cope with troubled relationships and the loss of loved ones. Through their daily experiences, viewers see how they develop together a spirit of co-operation and compassion.
