Flying Through the Clouds

Today at school I had a totally cool but wistfully sad (for me) conversation with two of the little sixth graders about flying. We were sitting in study hall and I don't quite remember how we started talking about airplanes, but somehow we got on that topic. I was telling the two of them about what it's like to be up in an airplane, how it feels to take off and land, and what looking out the window feels like. I told them all about looking down at the ground and seeing mountains and buildings and roads and rivers far below. They were amazed when I said that airplanes can fly through the clouds and even go above the cloud cover. I explained that sometimes it can be dark and cloudy, even raining, and the plane can fly above the clouds where it is bright and sunny. I've flown above clouds so thick it looks like nothing but white cotton with no hint of the ground below and I've flown over the ocean with nothing to see below but endless water. (The little girl wisely said that with nothing to see but water, one could fall asleep at that point of the trip, until there was actually something exciting to see).

They were so fascinated, it was almost heartbreaking. They've never been on a plane before and I don't know when or if they will ever have the opportunity to fly somewhere. Their families certainly cannot afford to travel in such a manner. I know that not everyone on Earth gets the opportunity to fly in an airplane (heck, I'd never flown before the age of 21), but what struck me was not that their families may not be able to afford airline tickets, it was more that these two miss out on so many experiences because they cannot fluently (or even effectively, sometimes) communicate with their families. How many times have they seen something interesting and tried to tell their families about it? How many times have they seen something confusing and not been able to get an answer as to what they saw? How many times have they gone somewhere with their families and not fully realized what was going on? How many times have they sat at the dinner table and not known what was being discussed? They get a lot of their information from watching television, but how many times do they wonder what the people on the screen are saying? Even with closed captions, these two children's reading ability doesn't allow full access to the information.