You are who you choose to be...(It's about the choices we make, Part II)

I thought, "This cannot be happening."

I am a GUY.

I eat food off of the floor.

I think bacon should be a food group.

I think tofu is just wrong.

During football season, I am in front of my big screen television, butt firmly on couch, remote firmly ensconced in hand, from the Thursday night ESPN game through the Monday night ESPN game.

I am a GUY.

A GUY does not CRY.

Especially at some flippin' cartoon featuring the voices of, who, Jennifer Aniston and Harry Conncick, Jr?

**********

I use to channel surf a lot, especially on lazy Saturday afternoons. (This was loooooong before I had children; since then I have not used the word "lazy" and "Saturday" in the same paragraph, much less the same sentence). Remote in hand, day old pizza by my side, I would shift aimlessly from channel to channel. Click. TNT. Click. ESPN. Click. TBS. Click. The Oxygen Channel. Shudders and convulsions. Click. Quickly back to ESPN.

Anyway, while channel surfing some time ago I literally stumbled upon a movie, a cartoon of all things, called "The Iron Giant." I vaguely remembered that this movie was given two thumbs up by Siskel & Ebert, and I had absolutely nothing better to do, so I thought, "What the heck. Let's waste a few hours and a few hundred thousand brain cells watching a cartoon."

I didn't expect much. After all, I am a GUY. A GUY does not watch cartoons.

I won't provide a recap of the entire movie other than to say it is one of the best movies EVER made. I mean EVER, EVER, EVER. It's that's good. But what really killed was the end. (Spoiler alert).

The year is 1958. The location, a small town in Maine. An atomic missile has been fired and is descending on the town in a misguided effort to destroy the Iron Giant, a giant metal machine that becomes a gun when confronted with a gun. The Iron Giant, who is feared by the townspeople and relentlessly pursued by army, is told by nine-year old Hogarth, his only friend, that when the missile comes down "everyone will die." The Iron Giant understands. He places a large metallic finger under Hogarth's chin, raises it gently, and says, "You stay. I go. No following."

The Iron Giant takes off, flying towards the missile. The missile reaches its apex, starts down. The score by Michael Kamen begins to swell. The Iron Giant can see the missile. Hogarth's words to the Iron Giant, spoken earlier in the movie, voice over the scene:

"You are who you choose to be."

The missile, now very close, is bearing in on the Giant.

The Giant utters only one word:

"Superman."

The score reaches a crescendo. The Iron Giant and the missile collide. The Giant is destroyed. But the town is saved.

I sat there is stunned disbelief. First chills. Then, my eyes narrowed. I blinked involuntarily. I thought, no way. No FREAKING way. This is NOT happening. But I could not stop. My eyes misted over.

I cried. At a stupid, moronic cartoon of all things. I was absolutely dumbfounded. This is just not what I do. But something about this scene, something I couldn't quite fathom, really moved me.

Click. I changed the channel. I needed to get back. Back to football. Back to blood and bruises. After all, I'm GUY.

And a GUY does not cry.

But I would mentally revisit that moment many times during the ensuing years.

***********

While writing a series of new blogs yesterday, and weighed down by various pressures, I stumbled across the following post on You Tube. It is the ending to the Iron Giant. Just the ending. If you have the time, you should watch it.

I did. And it still gave me chills.

So what is it about this scene? And why do I share it with you?

Two reasons.

Sometimes I get tired. I never imagined that convincing educators about the educational value of technology would be so difficult. I knew education had its traditions, I understood some of the financial constraints, but I never imagined it would be so hard. Thank God I work for a great company and great people. For visionaries. Smaller minds probably would have fired me a long time ago.

Sometimes I think, screw it. Sometimes I think we should just incorporate a charter school or establish a school within a school, write some grants, raise some money and do it ourselves. It couldn't be any harder than having to convince truculent board members or "on-the-8th-day-God-made-me" administrators about anything that smacks of pedagogical change. Sometimes I want to say: You keep on trumping up those 50% graduation rates. In the meantime, we'll keep fighting the good fight to prepare our kids for something more than a career flipping Whoppers.

But then I'm reminded why we're here. The kids. That's why we fight. Because we should be able to say to every child in every school, and really mean it, "You are who you choose to be."

What a beautiful thing to say. What a powerful thing to say. And we have the power, we have the means, to make this true, or certainly more true than it is now, for millions of children who depend on our schools and the decisions we make today.

Change begins with choice.

And with who you choose to be.

So with the Michael Kamen score swelling through the recesses of my mind, my resolve, though tested, remains firm. Launch the missiles. Slam your doors. Hold on to your industrial-age traditions. I understand.

I'm ready.

Progress can be slow. Change can be painful. But I'm going to keep moving forward.

Because that's who I choose to be.