So what does it mean?

I have to admit that I wasn't necessarily awestruck by the power of story (mo'olelo) today. The storyteller and story are both powerful, I agree. But the true power is in the meaning(s). Is the storyteller creating meaning with the words, or is the listener constructing meaning while the story is being told? It's an age old English question. I think it's both, sometimes. Today, I instead wondered about my own method of creating meaning. What do I do every day that either creates meaning or that is meaningful? (not that much) And then why does walking with everyone and hearing stories produce meaning? Is it because it's the most meaningful thing I've done all semester? And I'm not referring to anything philosophically or spiritually deep in that Depak Chopra way. And then I started to think about my students.























Amidst Kawika's stories about places, I couldn't help but watch the cars pass by. I know that the road is such a cliche' symbol, Jack Kerouak ya ya ya..progress, success blah blah I don't like the road as a metaphor personally, but I'm going to run with it. You don't really learn anything on a road, unless you're learning to drive. It's the places that the road takes you to that are important and full of meaning. That's what Kawika helped to create for us today. And really you have to get off the damn road to really experience anything and to produce meaning from the place. That's why us locals laugh at people on tourist buses. But then again, the road and sometimes the lost driver are excellent metaphors for our student's past educational experiences, and it's also a great metaphor for how they learn and how they operate. They just travel, yeah? They no get off. They don't really think "about." They just go (or in my case no go class). Maybe that's what we have to teach them. I'm not Hawai'ian, so I don't have an opinion of blowing the road up and sending all that is American back to the mainland, but I do think that the Hawai'ian value of making meaning from what you do is the way to go. And I think that's what we really need to infuse in the classroom. We have to surround them with tools that produce meaning from what they do, and then we have to put them back on the road. But hopefully, after we're all done, they not lost in the end.