We kicked off the last week of our month of May Slice of Life Story Challenge today with a common text about Socrates and his famous quotation that, "the unexamined life is not worth living." Students worked in small discussion groups to figure out what Socrates may have meant by this and how in the world it might relate to the brief personal anecdotes we've been reading and writing all month.
In case I needed any reminding, probably the main thing I took from today's lesson was that kids are funny. Not one of them would have chosen death over an unexamined life. Living as they do in a land where free thought and free speech are a given and so often taken for granted, many of them could not fathom Socrates' choice. Why didn't he just choose exile and go examine his life somewhere else? They wondered.
Even so, I'm not very worried that they are lemmings in training. Too many expressed their annoyance at this silly idea of self-examination (offered as it was by their teacher) all too clearly for that. One girl opened her group discussion with, "If self-examination is so great, how come we've never heard of it before? Everybody knows that vitamins and positive thinking will improve your life, but self-examination? I don't think so."
At the end of each class, I asked two questions. The first was: How does this essay relate to what we have been doing this month? The most common answer to that one was always that this story was a slice of Socrates' life, but eventually each class made it around to the idea that the daily writing we've done has been an opportunity for us to examine our lives. My second question was, What's your opinion on the value of self-examination? On that one, they were mixed. More than one student told me that if you spend too much time examining, you'll miss out on the living. And, as true as that seems at 10:35 PM on this Tuesday night, I had to take exception and encourage them to always make time for the living AND the examining.
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