Global Competence: What Do My Students Celebrate?

 

What I heard was, “Yesterday was finish independence. We watched a movie.” One of my 6th graders had paused to confide this to me in the hubbub of students pouring out of English class on Tuesday. In addition to the background tumult, there was the muffling effects of face masks and the distance of my ears above this year’s crop of sixth graders. 

My brain was spinning wildly, trying to construct meaning. Independent reading? But we hadn’t finished it—I’d briefly wondered about skipping, just for the first 3 days of this week, the first 10 minutes of class dedicated to independent reading. Should we spend the whole class on exam review? No, I’d finally decided it was most important to support the message that reading is always the foundational thing, a valued part of the routine, more important, even, than exams. And a movie—we definitely hadn’t watched a movie. I sometimes show clips, but the last ones I’d shown were several weeks ago. 

I bent down and put my ear next to his mask and asked him to repeat himself. As he did, the pieces clicked into place, and it suddenly all made sense: “Yesterday was Finnish Independence. We watched a movie.” I gave a thumbs-up and thanked him for sharing, and he joined the flow of half-grown humanity toward the door. 

I wavered between chagrin and pleasure as I thought about the EFL department discussion just a week earlier about chapter 3 of Becoming a Globally Competent Teacher, “Understanding of Global Conditions and Current Events.” We’d talked about the story of a first year teacher who told his class repeatedly the importance of being aware of global events, and the resentment one student directed at him when he failed to acknowledge the assassination of her country’s prime minister the day it happened. 

I was chagrined that in my long history of collecting the literature of my students’ heritage countries, it had never occurred to me to know the independence day. (Except Korea—because when I taught 10th grade we read the poem “August River”!) While I was disappointed in my own enormous oversight, I was pleased that the student somehow thought I would be interested in that bit of information.

So I’ve been sitting here researching Finland’s history. Sure enough—December 6 is the celebration of Finnish independence—104 years this year. The movie must have been The Unknown Soldier, based on a novel of the same name. As an educator, most of what I know about Finland has to do with its much-touted schools, so I figured a little more research was in order. Did you know that Finland was the world’s first country to give its citizens a legal right to internet broadband? That was in 2010.   

Here’s my Christmas holiday assignment: Research a significant national holiday from each country represented by my students. Make a calendar. Take some notice of the holidays in class. What a great opportunity to celebrate each student’s heritage and all the ways people around the world have fulfilled their roles as God’s image bearers to fashion cultures, societies, and political structures where humans can flourish.