.Welcome to Holland.

One reason I love being a teacher is that I get to guide students in learning new things; but another is that my students help me learn new things too!  This quarter I was blessed with a really great class - the students worked well together, there was a great sense of community, and they encouraged each other in their individual projects.  Overall, it was a great learning experience for me after last quarter which was unpleasant to say the least.  But I can see how I did things differently at the beginning of the quarter and how this created a better, more communal learning environment (sometimes difficult to create, I've found, with freshmen undergrads).

One of my students wrote her 102 paper arguing that parents should not choose to put their disabled children up for adoption.  She was very close to this issue because she is a triplet sister to a brother with cerebral-palsy. When she first began this project I wasn't sure where it would take her.  I didn't know that there would be many people out there against her argument, but we both found out there were plenty of counter-arguments to address. I tend to be pretty open to any project student might propose.  I mean, I won't let them go down a dangerous path that might have them frustrated and weary by the end, but I don't set strict limits about what they should do.  I have found so far that when they work through whatever problems might arise with their topics it can help them problem-solve and learn.

This quarter I also gave them the option (and encouraged them) to conduct interviews with someone connected to their topic in some way.  This student chose her mother and through that interview discovered a poem that her mother read when she found out about her son.  This was a special experience for the student and her mother; she told me she started to cry when her mother described the poem.  She shared it with me and I'm sharing it with you today!

Here's a recording of the poem or you can read it below - -

Welcome to Holland by Emily Perl Kingsley (1987)
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......


When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.


After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."


"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."


But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.


The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.


So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.


It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.


But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."


And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.


But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.