Wynter Tafoya wants to be a lawyer. Ayden Anaya wants to be a doctor. This is fourth grade, so everybody is entitled to change their mind. Many times. But sitting with Wynter and Ayden at James H. Rodriguez Elementary School, what interested me wasn't so much what these two children said they wanted to become. It was why.

"I just want to help people," Wynter said. Ayden gave essentially the same answer. "I want to be a doctor because I want to help people." Then he added something. "I also want to save their lives if I can."

That's an unusually specific ambition for a fourth grader. There's a reason. Ayden was five when his grandfather became seriously ill. He remembers going to the hospital and being told the doctors couldn't save him. His grandfather died. "I didn't want that to happen to anyone else," Ayden said. "So then I wanted to be a doctor so I could try to save their lives." He imagines working with the sickest patients, the people who are "almost gone," because those are the lives he most wants a chance to save.

Wynter's idea came more recently. She's watched documentaries featuring lawyers helping people who couldn't necessarily help themselves. That interested her. More specifically, Wynter thinks she might want to represent children who are being abused. "I want to be a lawyer for them."

There's something wonderfully uncomplicated about the way children sometimes describe enormous things. A grandfather dies. Maybe I'll become the doctor who saves someone else's grandfather. A child needs someone in their corner. Maybe I'll become the lawyer who stands there.

Wynter and Ayden were selected for our conversation because both are doing exceptionally well academically. Their principal, sitting in on the conversation, offered a detail of her own: neither child has ever once been sent to her office for a disciplinary issue. Not once. Neither seems particularly consumed by any of that, though. Ayden likes math, especially the increasingly large numbers fourth grade is beginning to throw at him. Wynter looks forward to Tuesdays and National Dance Institute, where fourth graders across Española Public Schools learn pieces of a performance that will eventually come together at Española Valley High School.

Wynter dances elsewhere, too. She was born and raised at Santa Clara Pueblo, where both sides of her family are Native American. She participates in traditional dances, including during the Pueblo's August feast day. Some dances continue into the evening. The celebration matters enough that the district closes school that day. Wynter occasionally needs the next day, too. "I'm just way too tired," she explained. It was perhaps the most fourth-grade answer of the morning.

And that's important. Because for all we can imagine about what these children might someday become, they're still children. Ayden still likes soccer, even though he's not entirely sure why he stopped playing regularly. Wynter likes the nature surrounding her home. When I showed them an aerial photograph I had taken of the Valley, Wynter studied the Rio Grande from above. "I didn't think it was that big." Their backyard looked different from 400 feet up.

Maybe childhood does, too. From inside it, fourth grade is Tuesdays and math problems and soccer and dancing and deciding what sounds interesting. From a little farther away, adults can sometimes glimpse possibilities children cannot yet see. A test result doesn't tell us what Wynter will become. It doesn't tell us what Ayden will become. As I told them, nobody should be defined by a single number. A strong result can tell a child something useful, though. You can do the work. What happens next is still yours to decide.

Maybe Wynter becomes a lawyer. Maybe Ayden becomes a doctor. Maybe neither does. There are years of discoveries, disappointments, changed minds, and unexpected opportunities between fourth grade and whatever comes next. But there's already something encouraging about the direction they're looking. One child is rooted in a Pueblo tradition generations old while imagining herself someday standing beside children who need an advocate. Another carries the memory of losing his grandfather while imagining himself saving somebody else's. Two children are discovering what they can do. The more interesting question is what they might someday do with it.