"Their hearts are easy to find."

Thursday came and went last week. It was June 23rd. And for the first time in over two months, I didn't write anything on this blog. My reason? I was so immersed in my family's crazy acclimation to the first week of summer that the days of the week didn't matter. I'd forgotten it was Thursday (or if I knew, I'd forgotten what Thursday meant). It was all-out beautiful, messy survival mode for Team McDonough.

Yet now, as the dust has settled into some semblance of a routine, I am left reflecting on the past three weeks, and how much I've learned.

Here's a start.

The attack at Pulse, the nightclub in Orlando, happened 18 days ago.

My kids started swimming lessons four days ago.

The attack at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul took place two days ago.

93 human beings were killed.
292 human beings remain injured.

Innumerable lives have been torn torn apart.
Futures lost.
Dreams disbanded.
Love, buried in an aching tomb of pain
and chased by a cocktail of asphyxiation,
infused with
anger,
confusion,
forgiveness,
disbelief,
a litany of other emotions.
And grief.

And there was unity.

And there was division.

After the attack in Istanbul, I wrote this poem on a piece of paper. I felt like we have had our hearts broken so many times that there's got to be some cost...some collective destruction...some adverse impact.

On our hearts.

Oh, and in the midst of all this, my kids are learning to swim.

I watch them in the water.

They are learning to trust that their little, slippery, shivering bodies genuinely want to float.
That they are filled with air, and that if they just release themselves from fear--if they trust their teachers--trust their buoyancy, that they can lean back and literally lay on top of the water!

When I watch my daughter swim away from me, a look of simultaneous horror and jubilation spreading through her cheeks...I feel so much love.

When I hold my children in the water I feel their hearts beating--thundering--in their little chests. They are so scared, and so excited...but most of all, they are just so alive.

I re-read my poem.
I am hopeful for my children, and I am sad at the world they are inheriting. But their hearts are so big. They hear about dogs who are abandoned, and their little faces contort in shock and disbelief because they don't understand how someone could leave something alone in the world.

This week as my internet browser toggles between horror and hopelessness, between sit-ins and sinners, between unity and division, my children are teaching me that we need to seek out those moments that make us alive. We need to hear our hearts beat. We need to remember that they won't beat forever, but they beat today. And they are muscles that need us to keep loving so we don't end up with hollow shells that echo beneath our ribs.

Just as my children's bodies want to float, our hearts want to love.

A friend e-mailed me after Istanbul. The message ended like this:

"Enough from me, now go and enjoy your babies...their hearts are easy to find."

May we someday, in the midst of a painful world that is struggling--and far too often failing--to love us back, say the same about our own hearts.

"I wish you so much happiness"

The ninth graders at my school graduated yesterday. 

They looked so handsome, so beautiful, so grown up. 

They made us proud. They gave speeches. 

They listened to wisdom. 

We clapped. 

We swallowed hard. 

Felt lumps in our throats. 

Pretended the bright sun was making us cry.

We heard their words, about how we--their teachers--

had seen their weaknesses and made them strong.

We heard how they now have the courage and confidence

to make a positive contribution to the world.

The chorus sang two songs.

I heard them sing a new song.

"Once I was seven years old, my mama told me," the lyrics began.

" 'Go make some friends or you'll be lonely.' "

I heard them sing an old song, too.

"Imagine all the people..." 

The words of both songs wafted on the wind, gliding over the audience and into the air. When the last chords were played, we were left in momentary silence.

In that moment, the link between these two songs struck me.

People. 

We need people. 

We need them because they're the antidote for loneliness, but also because they're the hope for the future. We imagine people, crave people, and we grieve for a world where people are kinder to people.

All of the graduates, as they said their goodbyes, wanted to see the people. They didn't wander back to classrooms, they craved connections, eye contact, wisdom, embraces.

They wanted to thank the people, hug the people, lean into the people, and feel the warmth of their bodies. 

They wanted their teachers, for they were the people who raised them, challenged them, watched them grow, and now stood like an aging forest of sturdy trees, so proud of the strong trees their saplings had become.

It's funny that schools are run by people; that teachers are one of the jobs that can't be replaced by machines. Sometimes I wish that I could. That I could be all things to all students. That I could be a pedagogical Swiss Army knife for their every academic and emotional need. 

But people can't do that.

People are flawed.

People mess up.

People are broken.

There is this machine called the Coca-Cola Freestyle that can dispense 165 different custom Coke drinks and flavors. From. The. Same. Machine.

Sometimes I wish that was me. That my students could hit a button and select the methods of instruction that work best with their learning style. I could connect to the auditory learners who love projects and music just as well as I could meet the needs of the multiple choice test-takers who love lectures and need to walk around while they think. Then, those kinesthetic thinkers who need to move around, and the auditory learners who need to hear things, and those students who struggle with executive functions and learn best with a graphic organizer and a teacher beside them, could all just hit a button and I could be that.

If someone needs corny jokes to relax? Presto, just hit the custom teacher button and the teacher fits the need.

If someone else needs a disciplinarian to keep them in line? Boom. The Freestyle Teacher is a master of restorative justice.

But people aren't like that. We can't be all things for all students. And, as teachers, graduation reminds us of this because, just as happy as we are to hug our former students and watch, admiringly, as they walk into the sunset of their future, there are also students who we think we might have missed; students for whom we could have done a little more, connected with more deeply.

But we're human. And we need humans. And there will be more humans to connect with those students, and that is all we can hope for: that the sum of a student's educational journey--whether it happens in a school or not--will include people who connect with that student. People who see them, and who leave them feeling fuller and more equipped to navigate the world where people are imperfect. And yet there is so much good in the midst of our mistakes, our risks, our flaws. Teachers bring out that good in children. They can see weakness and turn it into strength. And when they can't, they can trust that they did their best, and there will be other mentors and teachers and inspirations awaiting that child.

One of the graduates left a note in my mailbox.

It made me cry.

It ended with, 

"I wish you so much happiness..."

What a line.

What a good word.

That's my wish for my students, too.

That they would find their Coke Freestyle.

That their life would become the flavor that suits them.

I wish them so much happiness.

Freedom

The other day, something popped up on my Twitter feed that gave me pause.

If what it means to be 'educated' has changed, why hasn't the mechanism for becoming educated? #WednesdayWisdom

A response to this tweet soon followed:

Has what it means to be educated actually changed?

In all honesty, as I thought about this question, I became unsure...

Can someone actually receive an education? Is it bestowed, or is it achieved? Is it stalked like prey, or is it discovered like a treasure? Is it slain like a dragon, or liberated like a besieged castle? Is it built like a house, or conjured out of nothing like an alchemist's elixir?

Or, perhaps, an education is simply the sum of that which sticks.

When someone says, "I  got a crummy education in high school," what do they actually mean? What did they learn? If the answer is "nothing," who is to blame?

I don't entirely know where I'm going with this, but I saw a circularity to three interactions with students this week.

1. During a "This I Believe" speech, one of our 9th graders spoke about the reality that there's more to life than getting into Andover or Harvard...that getting over the pressure, embracing her own trajectory--one that was a complete rough draft, a work in progress--mattered more than anything else.

2. I watched a former student toe the line at Hayward Field in Eugene, OR last night. He had run on the cross country team when I was the assistant coach during my second year of teaching. He had been fast, but nothing extraordinary. I watched this student run 1500 meters in 3:41. He qualified for the finals on Friday. Surrounded by nearly 10,000 screaming fans, with the name of his Ivy league college adorning his chest, he breathed, strained, and exploded across the finish line in a blur of euphoria, sinews, and sweat.

3. I ran into the father of a former student last week. In 8th grade, the student had been in my advisory, and the family shared their plan for college: "[She] is going to get a college scholarship for field hockey," they said. "That is the plan." And it worked. Four years later, she enrolled at Quinnipiac University on a full scholarship. In the first week of practice during her freshman year, she tore her ACL. Over the course of the recovery process, she realized she wanted to play sports at a Division III school--there would be less pressure, more opportunity--and she transferred to a small college in North Carolina. A year later, she realized that in all of the pressure of making field hockey her life, of attending camps, practicing, practicing, practicing, it wasn't what she loved to do anymore. She had lost the love of the game that identified her. So, again, she transferred. This time, she wanted to go somewhere that was big enough for her to stretch herself, to reclaim her identity, to discover herself again...to be free. "So she's headed to Ohio State in the fall," her dad told me. "And she wants to be a teacher! Can you believe that...she loves it, loves the kids, the possibilities."

One of these students has carved his place in the world through sports. Another found that, once life humbled her--threw her a different direction, a new opportunity--it granted her the opportunity to explore her surroundings, to slow down and ask, "Who am I?"

One of my favorite educational theorists, bell hooks, wrote about this in the first book about teaching I ever loved, Teaching to Transgress:

“There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.” 

Sometimes, it's a different mountaintop.

When I was 16, I was in a horrible car accident.

Horrible.

I was driving, I became distracted, swerved, overcompensated, hit the snow at 65mph and went airborne.

It took them three hours to dig the car out.

Miraculously, all four of us survived this wreck.

It took a long time for me to heal.

Another thing this accident did, though, was it forced me to stop playing soccer and lacrosse. 

I took up running. I started writing poetry.

Suddenly, running and poetry were what sustained me. 

I wrote this--the beginning of a poem about what life was teaching me--a year later as I continued to process what it meant to have the view of my life change; what it meant to have my plan erased.

Here's what the unexpected does to us: it complicates things...it makes us hurt...it cauterizes our innocence...it curdles the sweet parts. But it also grows us, prunes us. It makes us free. 

As 17 year-old me once wrote, we've always wondered about this freedom, but we've never known to ask.

Freedom is scary, but it is new, and if we take the opportunity to reconnect with the present-tense version of ourselves, we gain perspective.

And that's when, as bell hooks goes on to explain, "education [is] about the practice of freedom."

At moments of rebirth, our education really begins. 

Education hasn't changed, it's still about the practice of freedom. If we can invite the personal into our educational narratives; if we can embrace the humbling moments of failure, struggle, and interrupted plans, then we can reclaim the mechanism for becoming educated, and liberate that beautiful, beating glob of muscle in our chests.

Bigger than Rushmore

Today I had a student leave an anonymous note on my desk thanking me for the year. It hit me deep. Humbled me. And it got me thinking about my teachers.

You see, eight years ago, Malcom Gladwell wrote one of the most fascinating articles on teaching I’ve ever read. Appearing in The New Yorker, Gladwell's article claimed that the professions of teacher and football quarterback were similar in one important area:  

there is nearly no way to predict which college graduates will achieve greatness at their given profession.  

Once the QBs/Teachers rise to the professional level, they are quickly critiqued and assessed and, within four or five years, they have either solidly established themselves as capable, flexible innovators, or they are out of the profession.

Woah.

Why has this concept risen to the front of my cerebral cortex again?  Fantasy sports.  

See, here’s my thought.  Imagine there was a fantasy teacher draft at a given school.  Who would go first?  Who would go last?  In what quantitative areas would teachers be evaluated?

Now, imagine all of the teachers you've ever had...who would you draft first, and what is it that made them great? Pushed them to the top of your draft board?

Are they tangible metrics, or intangible imaginaries? Are they gut feelings, or are they quantitative statistical metrics?

Maya Angelou told us that we will forget what people do and say, but we will never forget how someone makes us feel. Does this hold the key to how we remember our favorite teachers? Were are favorite teachers actually good at teaching? 

Today, as I reminisced, I looked back on my teachers, and here is my draft board:

1. Topher Waring 
2. Darren Redman 
3. Sydney King
4. Matt Cheney
5.  Lisa Travis
6. Kit Wilson
7. Rick Elkin
8. Jonathan Miller-Lane

In short, these people were all amazing because of who they were & the curiosity and passion they brought to the classes they taught. 

Mr. Waring was my science teacher in middle school. He built a solar car with us. And not a little soapbox derby car. He had us convert a 1969 VW microbus into a solar-electric behemoth named Helios the Heron that ran off of the sun's energy and 24 Dekka Dominator Gel Cel batteries. He also built a hot air balloon with us, he taught me how to identify trees, he taught me how to build a wing that would fly, and he helped me map the human body. He empowered me to love learning, and to see the connections that could be made. Mr. Waring was curious, and he gave us no choice but to join him in his joyful pursuit of the world beyond our classroom walls.

Mr. Redman played music while we took tests. He wore bow ties, taught me what decorum meant, spoke with crisp rhetoric, read the newspaper and carried it around with him. He played the guitar and sang "Blackbird" to his infant daughter during a faculty talent show. He built a house in the woods of Maine from the ground up. He would tell us we were "on the cusp of greatness" when we were close, but not quite there. He gave us quizzes each day and called tests "opportunities for success." He ended up being my college counselor and referred to my college visits as "filling out my dance card." He was my Atticus Finch, the man whose moral character seemed impossible to break, who was the epitome of what it meant to be a man, and whose intellectual depth and quality of character seemed to sparkle as he spoke.

Ms. King was an art teacher. I never had her in class, but she was the adult I knew I could talk to about anything. She was my rock during my parents' divorce, during pain. She was the first teacher I saw to be a human being with feelings, who suffered, knew pain, just like I did. Behind her wire-rimmed glasses she used to give me a knowing look whenever I jumped contagiously into activities like washing dishes in the cafeteria, or sorting recycling during our daily campus jobs. I remember when she announced she was getting married and knowing that we were losing a little of her. That we were no longer her priorities, and that was about right.

Mr. Cheney pushed me. He welcomed me into the world of Paul Bowles, Nikolai Gogol, Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, and Paul Celan. He made me feel like his equal, and he read us poems he'd written when he was our age. He directed the first real play I was ever in; he taught me to sing, to dance, encouraged me to shave my head with a razor, and coached me to speak in a Yiddish accent. When I graduated from high school he gave me a book. In it he wrote, "With thanks for your support over the past 4 years, for your seriousness as an English student, and your decency as a human being." I have tried to live up to the last one every day since.

Mrs. Travis was a dancer. She convinced me to take a dance elective. When I confessed that I'd taken the class because there was a pretty girl I wanted to be around, she told me she had to accept me into the class, and she did so because I was a dancer. I took risks. I stopped laughing at myself. I kick ball changed. I leaped. I improvised. I choreographed. I performed. I evolved.

Professor Wilson taught one class per semester that met once a week for 3 hours from 7-10pm. He told stories the entire time. He taught me about the beauty of painting. He taught me about Frederick Law Olmstead and the genesis behind Central Park; about James Fenimore Cooper; about the Catskills; about the origins of the term "rambling" and how it used to be a valued pastime that always ended with a picnic by a brook; he inspired me to ramble to the Catskills on a snowy Saturday with a stack of paintings, trying to find the spot they had been painted a century earlier. He taught me to memorize the Bible to better understand Biblical paintings. He taught me that the best way to begin a class is to tell your students about something that happened to you that week that made you think of them.

Rick Elkin taught me about pottery; about how to use my hands; about the power of vessels. He showed me what wabi sabi means, and how there is hidden beauty in letting a pit fire have its way with your vessel--in yielding to the earth and the flames. He sat with me in the dark for hours beside the outside kiln he'd built with us, watching bright New Hampshire stars flickering overhead, the glow of the kiln constant and orange. He told stories, he never minced words. He rode a mountain bike. Years later, I found him in New Mexico and he made an engagement ring for my future wife.

Jonathan heard me say, "I'll never be a teacher. That's too easy...I want to do something that's a challenge." He replied, "It's easy to be a bad teacher. But you might think it looks easy because you'd be pretty good at it." His advice was the best I've ever taken. He told me that on my worst day in the classroom, I can still be a positive role model for my students. He told me I didn't have to shave my beard when I applied for a teaching job. He showed me how to redirect energy using Aikido tactics. He said that was the key to teaching--redirecting energy that already existed in the universe, but never imposing your energy on another.


I suppose my conclusion is that teaching is nothing like being a quarterback. Sure, both are hard to predict when it comes to predicting greatness. But when comparing the metrics of a great quarterback to the stories of great teachers, my fantasy team is beyond numbers, they're bigger than Rushmore, and they outlast the words I could ever use to praise them.