The Hero’s Journey (into a Grocery Store, at Age 11)

The Hero’s Journey is the name we give to the universal journey into risk and fear to achieve something important, whether that’s Odysseus facing the Cyclops, Luke facing Darth Vader, or Encyclopedia Brown facing Bugs Meany.

Tested this way, the person comes out the other end a hero — often while quaking in their boots.

All of us, including kids, grow when facing a challenge and determining to overcome it (whether or not we succeed). Those challenges run the gamut. For one 11-year-old doing his Let Grow Independence Experience in Santa Fe, New Mexico, his challenge was…

…finding an item at the grocery store.

In the half-minute video below Kathleen Murphy, the young man’s teacher at the Fayette Street Academy charter school in Santa Fe, explains what happened. She also told us this cool fact: Though she was assigning the Let Grow Experience every-other week — homework that has kids go home and do something new, on their own, WITH their parents’ permission but WITHOUT their parents — she overheard some of her students saying they’d told their parents that it was EVERY week. They wanted twice as many chances to go on their hero’s journeys.

If you’d like your school to do The Let Grow Experience, all our materials are free. Click here to request them!