The opening scene of the 2004 film Yesterday shows a mother (named Yesterday) and her daughter Beauty, walking down a deserted South African road. The daughter, maybe 5 years old, is describing her desire to transform into a bird. Why? She wants to float over to their destination, relieving her little legs of the agony of this miles-long trek.
The finish line is a health clinic in a ramshackle hut. You see, Yesterday has developed this wretched, knock-you-over cough. But the line is lengthy, so they wait and wait until it’s announced that everyone else must return next Tuesday.
Next Tuesday? A once-a-week doctor? Yes.
Yesterday and Beauty tramp home. They repeat the journey, but again they are not early enough, not one of the chosen.
Weeks later, Yesterday meets the doctor, who asks her to read a consent form to draw blood. We realize that her patient cannot read or write. She draws the blood anyway and reveals the diagnosis.
HIV.
The film explores the world of a dusty village, of water drawn from a collective pump, of education as a commodity, of the ailing left to die without medicine or even shelter.
We have to show our students this world, our world. We have to thrust them outside of their narrow space. We have to provide opportunities for them to compare their own systems—educational, healthcare—with those in developing countries, to reach conclusions, to advocate for change. Films have the power to spark these conversations.
So do impassioned colleagues.
Sandy Sermos will not allow her students to ignore social injustice. For more than 30 years, Sandy has pushed middle school students to consider food distribution, to research issues surrounding water quality and access, to learn, to debate, to care.
“She constantly makes us feel like we can make a difference,” says eighth-grader, Marina. “Not all teachers can do that.”
Sandy’s enthusiasm for learning is contagious. If she told students to meet her at 3:40 a.m. on a Saturday to study some global issue, they would be there.
Last year, her students wrote first- and second-place essays in the national Philosophy Slam, which asked them to grapple with whether the “pen is mightier than the sword.” For the past two years, her students have been state champions in the Future Problem-Solvers competition.
In one week, Sandy will load a bus with 20 students and go to the Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Ark. There they will learn lessons about poverty as they simulate life in a developing country. For this “vacation,” students will not have their iPods, their warm blankets or their refrigerators. Instead, they will subsist on meager food--rice, vegetables and eggs.
Depending on the country where they “live,” the students may have, say, abundant water, but limited firewood. They will have to negotiate with other “villages” to exchange resources. Some rice for a sprinkling of water, perhaps? Then they will build a fire, cook their meal, and sleep (or lay awake) inside the likes of, say, a Zambian hut.
“You might not think about people who are hungry,” said David, another eighth-grader. “Or, if you do, you might think, ‘oh, that’s not so bad.’ But this trip will help us understand a little bit more of what they go through.”
Sandy’s students know that her worries about our planet run deep and that her expectations for them run high. She trains them to be thinkers because we need empathetic problem-solvers in our crippled world.
For Yesterday. For today.
And, of course, for tomorrow.
Baker is a middle school language arts teacher in Missouri.
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