Today, I had the opportunity to speak with a counselor who works at our institution. She shared many of her experiences working with students, including the different struggles they carry, the ways they respond to problems, and the patience required to understand what may exist beneath a student’s behavior. Our conversation felt refreshing and enlightening as we were appreciated the beautiful greens at the campus. It reminded me that education is never simply about delivering content. We encounter students as human beings before we encounter them as learners.
During our conversation, I also shared some of my own work involving art, embodiment, and healing. It made me think again about a question that has followed me throughout nearly every stage of my teaching experience: What can I truly offer my students as an educator?
Society and educational institutions understandably establish expectations for students. There are standards, curricula, assessments, grades, graduation requirements, standardized tests, and measurable outcomes. These structures exist for a reason. Society depends upon a certain degree of stability, predictability, and shared expectation. As teachers, we also have an obligation to prepare students to succeed within those structures.
I cannot simply offer students unlimited freedom for the sake of freedom itself. I have a responsibility to help them learn the knowledge and skills defined by the curriculum. I want them to succeed academically, professionally, and practically.
Yet I continue to wonder: Must freedom and structure always exist as a tradeoff?
Must we choose between teaching students what they are expected to know and allowing them to discover who they might become?
Perhaps we do not.
Perhaps education becomes most meaningful when structure provides the foundation upon which freedom can grow.
This tension has followed me throughout my teaching life. Every time I design a lesson, an activity, or a project, I find myself trying to strike a balance between these two ideas. I want students to acquire concrete skills, but I also want those skills to become tools through which they can discover something about themselves.
In my programming classes, I told my students something that I deeply believe:
In the world of programming, you have the ability to create a world of your own.
It may begin as a small digital canvas, a website, an animation, a game, or a few lines of JavaScript. Yet within that space, you can construct something that reflects who you are. Your hobbies, cultural background, beliefs, ethics, humor, memories, interests, imagination, and ways of thinking can all become part of what you create.
Programming does not have to be merely technical.
STEM does not have to exist separately from art.
A piece of code can contain personality. An interface can contain empathy. A game can contain a story. A website can become a place where someone feels seen. Technology can become another language through which a person speaks.
Of course, creative freedom requires craftsmanship.
An artist must sharpen the knife before carving.
An architect must understand the foundation before raising the structure.
A musician must learn how sound behaves before learning how to bend it.
Likewise, students must develop technical foundations before their ideas can fully take form. Syntax, functions, variables, logic, design principles, debugging, and computational thinking may sometimes appear mundane, but these are the tools that eventually allow imagination to become reality.
Knowledge does not restrict creativity.
Knowledge gives creativity somewhere to stand.
I often think about how little of what we call “new” truly begins from nothing. Every computer, programming language, mathematical concept, artistic technique, and technological system carries traces of generations before us. Human knowledge is an inheritance accumulated slowly across centuries. Scientists, artists, philosophers, engineers, mathematicians, craftspeople, teachers, and countless unnamed thinkers have contributed pieces of understanding that were passed from one generation to another.
Even the most futuristic technology carries something ancient within it: the human desire to understand, to build, to communicate, and to imagine what does not yet exist.
Perhaps this is one of humanity’s most remarkable abilities.
We imagine possibilities before they become realities.
And creativity may be one of the most deeply human forms of that ability.
When students begin to understand this, I hope they also begin to understand something larger: knowledge belongs to them once they learn how to use it.
In the worlds they create, they may decide who they want to become.
That, perhaps, is one form of freedom.
Knowledge opens doors that previously appeared invisible. It gives us choices. It gives us the ability to respond differently when life places obstacles in front of us. It does not guarantee that everything will be easy, nor does it guarantee that every dream will become reality. But it expands the number of paths available to us.
Whenever my students feel stuck someday, I hope they remember that they still possess something powerful: the ability to learn, to think, to create, and to choose another direction.
There may always be another possibility.
One of the things I appreciate most about working with young people is that their thinking has not yet become completely fixed by the assumptions society gradually teaches us to accept.
Adults often learn to say:
“That is unrealistic.”
“That is not how things work.”
“Someone has already tried that.”
“There is no opportunity there.”
Young minds sometimes ask a much more interesting question:
“Why not?”
Their ideas occasionally seem impossible, incomplete, or impractical. Yet within those ideas is something precious: the willingness to imagine that the world might be arranged differently.
And sometimes they inspire me to reconsider what I have already accepted as impossible.
Recently, I visited a local art market. I saw many talented artists displaying and selling their work. Their paintings, crafts, designs, and handmade objects contained enormous amounts of care and individuality. Yet I noticed that some of these artists had very little online presence. Some did not have websites of their own, and many appeared to depend almost entirely upon physical markets to connect with customers.
I kept thinking about that experience.
Later, during a classroom activity, I asked my students to identify problems they noticed in the world around them and propose digital projects that might address those problems. They did not need to know how to hard-code every part of their idea yet. That was not the purpose.
The purpose was to begin thinking like designers.
What problem do you notice?
Who experiences that problem?
What could you contribute?
What perspective do you have that someone else might not?
What could technology make possible?
One group proposed creating a website for fashion designers and local artists where creators could display and sell their work through an open online platform.
I immediately thought about the art market.
I told them about what I had seen and explained that their idea was not merely hypothetical. There are artists within our own community who could potentially benefit from something like this. With thoughtful design and the right strategy, such a platform might allow a local artist’s work to reach someone in another neighborhood, another city, or perhaps eventually much farther away.
Our community could use ideas like that.
Will this particular student project eventually become a real business or community platform?
Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
But that is not entirely the point.
I do not believe the deepest purpose of education is to give young people a grand master plan for their lives. We cannot predict exactly what careers will exist in ten years, what opportunities will emerge, what difficulties they will encounter, or where their lives will lead.
Perhaps one of the greatest things a teacher can give a student is much smaller and much more powerful:
the thought that something might be possible.
“This might work.”
“I might be able to build this.”
“I could learn how to do that.”
“I have an idea worth exploring.”
“I might have something to contribute.”
Those small sentences can become beginnings.
Young people are full of possibilities precisely because so much of their future remains unwritten.
My responsibility is not to write that future for them.
My responsibility is to place as many tools as I can within their reach, teach them how those tools work, and encourage them to discover what they might build.
And in return, they continuously teach me how many possibilities I have stopped noticing.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet beauties of teaching: knowledge does not travel in only one direction.
I inherit knowledge from those who came before me. I pass what I can to my students. My students reinterpret it through minds different from my own. Their ideas return to me transformed, and I find myself learning again.
The cycle continues.
Human beings have always pursued freedom, yet I increasingly wonder what freedom actually means.
If freedom is imagined as some final destination, perhaps we will always remain disappointed. There will always be another boundary, another responsibility, another limitation, another expectation. Absolute freedom may itself be a paradox.
Perhaps freedom is not measured by how far we can physically travel, how many rules we can escape, or how completely we can remove ourselves from structure.
Perhaps freedom begins in the mind.
Freedom is the ability to see more than one possibility.
It is the ability to question an assumption.
It is the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist.
It is the knowledge that allows us to understand the world well enough to respond to it creatively rather than simply accept it.
A person who possesses knowledge possesses choices.
And a mind capable of imagining alternatives can travel remarkably far, even when the world places boundaries around it.
That is why I increasingly see education as a gateway to freedom.
Not because education removes every limitation, but because it expands the landscape of what a person can imagine doing next.
So to my students:
Learn the foundations.
Sharpen your tools.
Ask questions.
Build strange things.
Make mistakes.
Challenge assumptions.
Listen to the wisdom that has been passed down to you, but do not be afraid to add something of your own.
When the world tells you that there is only one path, look carefully. There may be another path hidden somewhere nearby, waiting for someone curious enough to discover it.
And when you encounter moments in life when you feel trapped, uncertain, or unable to move forward, I hope you remember that knowledge remains in your hands.
Your ability to think is power.
Your ability to learn is power.
Your ability to create is power.
Your ability to imagine another possibility is power.
May you use that power wisely.
May your mind travel far.
May you always remain curious enough to imagine what the world could become rather than merely accepting what it already is.
And above all, may you find freedom and joy in the journey of searching.
To my students,
from your teacher.
Ka Hei Cheng 