What We Created Still Lives
- Dr. Shannon Bruce Ramaka
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Lessons from Our 1998 Classroom
By Dr. Shannon Bruce Ramaka
I had expected a warm reunion after many years. What I didn’t expect was to be completely blown away by the shared memories we still held—rooted in powerful moments of learning together.
Last May, I returned to Southern Oregon after years of living and teaching around the world. We arranged to meet for lunch—my former student, her mother, and her grandmother. It had been twenty-six years.
We sat together, catching up, sharing pieces of our lives since those early days in the classroom.
And then, somehow—without planning, without prompting—it happened.
A line surfaced.
“In the year 1977…”
She said it first.
And instantly, I felt it.
“The Voyagers launched toward the heavens…”
I joined her.
And then we were both saying it—no hesitation, no searching—falling into the rhythm as if no time had passed at all:
“Number one and number two…The scientists knew just what to do…Taking records full of sound,Hoping messages would be found…The planets lined up, the time was right,The pictures of the planets were out of sight!”
We finished almost at the same time.
And then we stopped.
Both of us a little stunned.
Across the table, her mother—who had once been my classroom assistant—and her grandmother watched with a kind of quiet confusion, as if they were witnessing something they couldn’t quite access.
But we could.
Because we had been there.
What struck me wasn’t just that she remembered—it was that we both did.
The rhythm.The cadence.The feeling of it in the body. Because this wasn’t something we had memorized in the traditional sense.
This was something we had created together.
In 1998, I designed and co-led a small charter school housed inside a church in Eagle Point, Oregon. This student had been with me even earlier—one of my first first graders—and later became part of that founding group of students in grades 5–8.
At the time, we were studying space exploration—reading, researching, asking questions about Voyager 1 and 2. But instead of ending with a worksheet or a test, we turned what we learned into something else.
A chant.A rhythm.A shared creation.
We added movement. Voice. Energy. We shaped it until it felt alive.
It became ours.
And somehow, it stayed.
In today’s world, we talk constantly about what students should learn.
Standards. Benchmarks. Outcomes. Data.
But we rarely ask the more important question:
What do students actually remember—and why? Because the truth is, most of what we teach is forgotten. Not because students aren’t capable. But because the learning never truly belongs to them.
That moment at lunch—the poem returning to both of us after twenty-six years—was a kind of answer.
Students remember what they:
help create
experience physically and emotionally
connect to meaning, not just information
They remember learning that moves.
Long before terms like “project-based learning,” “arts integration,” or “applied neuroscience” became part of educational language, we were experimenting with something simple:
Let learning be human.Let it be creative.Let it be shared.Let it be felt.
We didn’t always have the right words for what we were doing.
But the students did.
And decades later, they still do.
Today, as we look toward new frontiers—AI, space exploration, the Artemis missions returning us to the moon—I find myself thinking back to that table.
To that unexpected moment.
To two voices, once teacher and student, finding each other again in the same rhythm.
So perhaps the question is not:
What are we teaching?
But rather:
What are we creating that students will carry with them—long after they leave us?
I captured that moment on video—two voices rediscovering something they had created together decades earlier. Moreover, I now carry within me the honorable truth: what we create with students doesn’t disappear. It returns.
This work was never mine alone. With gratitude to founding student Katie St. George; to my colleague Katherine Leppek, who co-led the creation of the Renaissance Charter School; and to Ronda St. George, who was part of those early classroom years.
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