The craft of of being human

My eighth graders sat transfixed, their eyes locked on Frank Kwei as he poured hot water over the crude, red-brown teapot he held in his hands.

"Doesn't that water burn your fingers?" one of them asked.

"I suppose it does," smiled Frank, now pouring the steaming water over a basket of beautiful jasmine pearls. He circled his pot, cascading the water down so as to douse each pearl with a thin stream. As the water graced each of their surfaces, the pearls unfurled, revealing beautiful wet green leaves that stretched their arms upward.

"Then why do you do it?" she asked, curious.

"It is ritual...a part of the craft." Frank's words emerged from his lips slowly, a calm smile following each word. He went on,
"My job is to help people slow down, and each of the rituals in my preparation of this tea helps me to slow down, too."

It was the day before my eighth grade world cultures classes were to present their research at the annual World Congress Symposium. This particular group, the Human Rights task force, had a mere 26 hours before they would sit in front of their peers and deliver their findings, synthesis, and solutions. Yet as we visited Frank Kwei at his tea pavilion, any anxiety remained undetectable on their faces. They were rapt by the subject matter, enamored by the tea being prepared for them. They had slowed down, and there was no place for anxiety to fit in.

Frank spoke again.

"When someone prepares you tea, you do not have to enjoy the tea. But you do have to respect it. Thousands of years have gone into its creation. The soil, the science, the cultivation, the mastery, the wisdom."

My students sip.
They struggle to describe what they taste.
They whisper.

"Burnt toast."
"Seaweed."
"Nutty steam."

"Those are tannins," says Frank.
"Yes, now let it touch all the parts of your tongue," he encourages.
"What are the two flavors doing to each other?"

They respect the tea.

Frank shows them a teapot made of ceramic.

"This is a bowl and a lid."

The students can't argue. It is. Bowl and lid.

"People have been making tea with a bowl and lid for thousands of years. Could they develop a more modern way to make tea?"

The students answer yes.

Of course.

"If something is beautiful, efficient, simple, and it has worked for 4,000 years. Leave it alone."

My students walk quietly as we leave. Tomorrow they will teach me about the world. They will teach me about how their generation has unfinished business. How they will be the ones responsible for solving world hunger, illiteracy, air pollution, and deforestation. They will teach me that 15 people die of hunger every minute; that malaria is one of the largest killers in world history; that stem cell research might hold the key to solving Alzheimer's Disease; that our earth, with its oceans and winds already does everything we need to energize our future.

I am reminded that behind all of our anxiety, our technology, our social awareness, our flaws, our hopes, are mammals. Awesome mammals. Mammals who have been doing something beautiful, efficient, simple, for thousands of years.  Problems have been solved, and problems we can't predict are beyond the horizon.

We do need to evolve, but in our evolving, we also need to leave ourselves alone. We need to focus on the simplicity of slowing down. Because in our slowing, in the midst of our lives, we see the connections that lead to possibilities.

Life hurts sometimes, but it is our ritualistic nature that helps us heal, retain hope.

It is part of the craft of being human.

Choices

On the night before my wedding, my best man reassured a young and anxious me:

There are ten things that are going to go wrong tomorrow. My job is to make sure you don't know about any of them. You have a choice: either let me take care of it, or worry.

I had a choice. I could trust my friend, Tucker, to care for me, or I could worry. With the exception of Hurricane Danny's surprise arrival, I never found out what else went wrong (and I learned that rainy photos are really beautiful).

We make choices all the time about how to act, how to respond, how to be.

I was thinking about this moment this week as my 8th grade world cultures students discussed the Japanese response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. What was it about the Japanese culture, their psyche, values, their ethos, that allowed them to withhold outward resentment?

They made a choice.

When my 7th graders discussed Atticus Finch's "universe of obligation" in To Kill a Mockingbird, they recognized that he was hedging the cultural norms...that he was taking a risk, and there was a cost involved.

He made a choice.

As I watched the Environmental and Human Rights task forces prepare for World Congress this week, their peer-elected leaders guiding their final preparations and rehearsals, I saw the emphasis they were putting on human choices.

We have a choice here, my students reminded me.
We cause these problems.
Doing the right thing is inconvenient, sure, but change doesn't come about because it's cozy. Sometimes it hurts. You've got to give something up to transform.

We are making choices.

During our study of To Kill a Mockingbird this year, we've used a resource called "Facing History, Facing Ourselves." The motto of this educational resource is

People make choices; choices make history.

Woah. What a line. It's one of those sentences you almost want to read twice. Read slower.

People make choices;
choices make history.

My division head has always suggested that those tricky 7th - 9th grade years of early adolescence are really about two things: independent learning and relationships. And both of those areas have to do with choices.

On a related note, my school has adopted a new disciplinary practice this spring. We've replaced detentions with a more responsive process requiring students whose actions (i.e. choices) require a disciplinary response to have a conversation with their teacher and produce a written reflection to a prompt.

In short, we want our students to see patterns in their actions. We want them to see that their choices illustrate their histories, and that there are subsequent choices that can dictate their futures. We want them to understand that, like my best man assured me, there are people who can support us, but we have to make a choice to lean on them. Discipline shouldn't be shameful, it should be restorative. It should help us see the patterns of our choices, and the ways they affect our learning and our relationships.

Like Tucker said, ten things will probably go wrong today, but we have a choice about how we react to those trials.

Whether it's the ethos of a nation, the character of a father in 1930s Alabama, our collective global impact, or our individual actions in middle school, we make our choices, and our choices make history.

Binding Off

[Note: yesterday my school welcomed Marc Brackett, Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence to campus. Our time spent with him impacted much of my conscience as I wrote this post]


I've been learning lots from my students lately. Lots. 

This sort of thing always happens in the spring. Just as we begin preparing to bind off this experience we've created together (just as my Granny Ros used to bind off her knitting projects); as the synapses are firing; and curiosity and subject matter converge; and the classroom culture is manifest; and we're all steaming forward alongside one another; and we've hit our rhythm as a unit...the year ends.

Final exams are administered, grades are earned, and this experience we've shared together becomes a heap of feelings, events, and growth, that quickly bursts into summer. And it's over.

Yet never in the year do I learn more from my students than in the final six weeks of a school year.

The other day I asked my students to write personal vignettes on the topic of "Speaking Up." It fit with To Kill a Mockingbird, and it represented another opportunity for my students to write from their hearts--an activity that almost always yields their best writing. I'd borrowed the idea from The Sun Magazine, an amazing ad-free literary publication that allows readers to submit short, autobiographical pieces on a common topic. So, we read a handful of "Speaking Up" submissions from  The Sun that dealt with pretty heavy topics and talked about what the stories made us feel.

These were stories that hurt. Stories that were hard to tell.

As I presented the assignment to the students, I added, "now your 'speaking up' stories might not be as intense or emotionally raw as these ones, and you might consider using an instance when you wish you'd spoken up, or where you saw someone else speak up and gained respect for them..."

I kept talking.

But, as usual, I said too much. In an effort to scaffold for my students, to provide differentiated structure for the ones who wanted options, I underestimated both their creativity and the breadth and depth of their own life experiences.

I forgot how much a 12 or 13 year-old feels.

I'm particularly embarrassed by this because I think about my students' emotions all the time...I care about them...I genuinely try to listen when we talk. And still, I forgot how much they feel, how varied their experiences are.

The answer is everything.

They feel it all.

And, frankly, this assignment wouldn't have been as rich in September as it is now. The trust we've built--the conversations we've had--have carved a channel from their wounded, courageous words to my heart that they could not have fabricated nine months ago. Writing can do this. It can put words to what can't be said. It can illustrate feelings. It can be a way to heal.

They have been hurt, and they have shown amazing courage in the face of hurt, but it's the process of writing that really allows them to get right with their feelings.

I often think of my role as a teacher as one of those scouts from old westerns who rides his horse to the hill, scanning the horizon for threats in the distance. As the wagon train sleeps in the field below, he (for they're usually men) ensures that everyone is safe, and he surveys the landscape for all that is to come, both the good and the bad. He looks ahead. He literally has pro vision. He is the provider.

As men and women who teach, we must see ourselves as emotional providers for our students. This doesn't mean we have to give our students anything other than an opening to share, and an opening to admit that there's more to the world than school. That their education involves everything they see, and hear...but it also is everything they feel. We provide in a curricular sense by seeing them as learners, and by supporting their development, but that can't be all.

Jamie Tworkowski wrote a book entitled If You Feel Too Much. It's really good. In it, he writes this.

“If this world is too painful, stop and rest. It’s okay to stop and rest. If you need a break, it’s okay to say you need a break. This life –it’s not a contest, not a race, not a performance, not a thing that you win. It’s okay to slow down. You are here for more than grades, more than a job, more than a promotion, more than keeping up, more than getting by.This life is not about status or opinion or appearance. You don’t have to fake it. You do not have to fake it. Other people feel this way too. If your heart is broken, it’s okay to say your heart is broken. If you feel stuck, it’s okay to say you feel stuck. If you can’t let go, it’s okay to say you can’t let go.You are not alone in these places. Other people feel how you feel. You are more than just your pain."

My students reminded me of this. 

I knew it, but I had to relearn it.

Sometimes quiet can get you there. Sometimes a conversation can do it. And sometimes, it helps to write.

I have a photograph of myself as a 7th grader that sits on my desk. As I glance over at myself now, I feel silly for forgetting how much I felt back then. I forget that I am the person who felt like they feel. Who still does. That I still feel too much sometimes. And that we all need to take a second to stop and rest to survey the horizon...because even when we bind off into the sunset at the end of our school year, the story isn't over. We're always feeling. And in our feeling, we can learn. And in our learning we can grow toward the next horizon.

Wabi Sabi

Each year, my school holds a "Grandparents and Special Friends Day."

And it's awesome.

The whole day becomes somewhat muted. The students move slower, speak more quietly, hold doors longer. They give up their seats, they give directions. Patience, and kindness, and a chivalrous calm win the day.

This year it was rainy and gray. A perfect day to move slowly.

For the most part, grandparents are so thrilled to watch their grandchildren; so proud to see the limbs of their family tree so soundly secured to the vision they've had for their family.

Blossoming.

As for me, along with connecting with our visitors, asking questions, gently shaking hands (and offering the crook of my elbow whenever I can find the opportunity), I try to guide my classroom conversations in a direction that will involve our celebrated guests.

For my 7th grade English class, this meant a discussion of wisdom and knowledge as we analyzed Scout and Jem's visit to Calpurnia's church in chapter 12 of To Kill a Mockingbird. Grandparents smiled as students admitted that they "don't know too many 13 year-olds they would describe as particularly wise."

"Who are the people in your lives who are wise?" I ask.

Nobody needs to answer. Everybody smiles.

Wisdom comes with making mistakes. It comes with living. With taking risks.
Life humbles you, and you grow.

For my 8th grade World Cultures class, our time together included a conversation about wabi sabi. I read them a children's book by Mark Reibstein that defines it like this.

Wabi Sabi is a way of seeing the world that is at the heart of Japanese culture. If finds beauty and harmony in what is simple, imperfect, natural, modest, and mysterious. It can be a little dark, but it is also warm and comfortable. Still, for many in Japanese culture, it is best understood as a feeling, rather than an idea. 

I hadn't thought much about the impact this word would have on Grandparents and Special Friends Day. I like the word, and that was enough. Still, it represents one of those instances where I end up jumping around my classroom yelling things like,

ISN'T THIS SO COOL?!

AREN'T YOU AMAZED BY THIS?!

DON'T YOU WANT TO HAVE THIS WORD, AND OWN THIS WORD, AND ADOPT IT, AND LOVE IT, AND HAVE IT IN YOUR MIND, AND USE IT IN YOUR MOUTH, AND SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS?

But on Grandparents and Special Friends Day, I didn't have to. They got it. All of them. They saw that there's a little "beautiful ugly" in wabi sabi. That it's digging your toes beneath the hot sand to find the cool. It's the fright and thrill of thunder. It's the nighttime sounds you cannot see. It's smells you love, not because they're good, but because they're familiar. It's the stained carpets and chipped mugs that punctuate the rhythm of our days.

Of course, they also made connections to the yin and yang of Taoism, and the escape from earthly desires of Buddhism. They had the scholarship because we were in school. They had the curiosity because they like the course and are innately curious. But they also had the mindfulness to slow down...to be still in the moment. They were just...so...present.

I wrote last week about not having enough time, and here's what yesterday taught me:

We have enough time. We've just got to figure out how to spend it well. Grandparents and Special Friends Day granted us the opportunity to slow down. There was a mutual understanding that this was a day about being present, and about taking it slow.

I love seeing the circularity of the subjects I teach: English, world cultures, and American history. Whether we're discussing why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird; or why Siddhartha grieved for the suffering of the destitute; or what compels a human to so easily shed morality in the name of personal gain, there is so much knowledge to understand...but if we're able to take a moment to be still, to soak in the details, we just might encounter the place where our hearts meet our minds.

It's a feeling I don't think we have a word for. It's a feeling I like, and a feeling that makes me sad.

It's wabi sabi.