Space in the family of things

Sometimes I get jealous of birds who, as they soar, have so many directions from which to choose.

I like to run in the woods for this reason. I love the feeling of having endless trails and wooded paths to blaze down; I love the opportunities to fly over roots and around rocks--the nuances and variability is just endless and beautifully poetic. The rhythm one of improvisation and movement, momentum and balance, all of it a beautiful dance.

I suppose that's why I hate the treadmill.

All of it, though, corresponds to our human relationship with space.

Sometimes, we need space from humans. As Roderick Nash writes in my favorite nonfiction book Wilderness and the American Mind, 

"Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation."


Yet, at other times we need a peaceful, quiet space to be with other humans.

In spheres of learning, like the one I inhabit with my students at the school where I teach, everything is about human beings and the spaces in which we spend time.

Sure, the relationships are most important, but the links between autonomy and collaboration, between support and self-advocacy, are a constant dance of beautiful proportions. Whether academic or social-emotionally, schools are fragile places because at any given moment we--as inhabitants of schools--are required to gauge what those around us need--for themselves and from us.

Mac, a ninth grader at our school, spoke today during his "This I believe" speech about the importance of being outside...of the dueling personalities of wildness and peace in nature. And it has made me think of the ways I hold space for my students, and of the ways that caring for them.

The Rev. angel Kyodo williams (one of two female zen teachers of African descent in history) says, "Love is space. It is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are."

And this is so much of what we do as educators: we engage in the space between ourselves and our students. We invite them into the sphere of our own experiences and we ask for permission to coax their own realities and identities out of them. Sometimes our students "need space," and other times they need us to fill their space with support and care.

Like birds, there are so many directions to fly. Sure, the rigid rails of the textbooks and curriculum churn forward like a chuffing freight train with a destination and a time table and a conductor managing the decorum and accountability...but the education of humans doesn't actually look like that.

In scripture, Matthew 6:26 reads, "Behold the birds of the sky, that they don't sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them."

The space between ourselves and our students is fertile. And from that space we harvest moments filled with both melancholy and exultation. But in both, there can be joy.

My students remind me of this daily. For them, on even my worst days, I want to answer the call of Jamie Tworkowski, who calls us to be "a living, breathing, screaming invitation to believe better things."

I realize I have drawn inspiration from a variety of people's words in this post. I will end with more words that are not my own: my favorite poem of this week, "Wild Geese," by Mary Oliver.

 May we, as teachers--along with all the teaching and assessing and affirming and guiding--above all else, find space in each day to announce our student's place in the family of things.

Slowing Down

Earlier this week I watched a video clip from a well known personality in the world of personal development and growth. This celebrity enjoys interviewing experts in a variety of fields, each of whom offers insights to help viewers rethink the systems, patterns, and mindsets that dictate the ways they function and interact with the habitats and people around them.

I enjoy gleaning insights from these talks, and I often find application to the relationships I cultivate in my classroom.

This week, I listened as an expert professed that "the worst exchange we can make as professionals is trading our time for money."

I understand that if we can create systems that allow our money to grow without our daily engagement or manipulation (i.e. "passive income" or "compounding income"), our money grows more quickly.

But when it comes to impact...when it comes to the exchanges that have value, I just don't see it.

Sure, I could create programs and systems that enable my work as a classroom teacher to be conducted in the absence of my instruction, conversation, or connection with them. I could build apps for other teachers and sell my lesson plans online and engage in all those entrepreneurial pursuits...and I might do that. In fact, I think about it often.

But the reality is, when I think about my decision to be a teacher, shortcuts and growth just can't be fabricated. The currency in a classroom is in the relationship. And relationships take time.

Without connections, something would be missing.

Education isn't about what we do. It's about how we do things. How we spend our time.

Our shared days in the classroom are finite, and yet we have the opportunity to be with one another in these moments. Our time is our currency, because nothing is of greater value.

This week, as many of the students in my classroom were out sick, we happened upon a really wonderful project that takes time. My students are creating maps of Africa and looking for correlations between them. My hope is that they will struggle to see ways that their research and collections of data align with one another; but sometimes they won't. Sometimes the investments of time they make will be distinguished by the lack of correlation...by the thing they fail to see come to fruition. I want to leave them enough time to be okay with that...to appreciate the journey.

They are trading time for something that might not fill their bank account...that might not compound. That might not yield a 100% when it comes to conventional measurements of "winning" or "victory."

But I love spending time with my students as they collect data, as they pore over spreadsheets and graph ideas. I love seeing their colored pencils emerge as they draw maps and we play music from the ancient Malinke empire of west Africa.

We are spending time slowly, together, letting the process guide us. Some of the maps aren't particularly good when it comes to coloring within the lines and employing key-related conventions of color and cohesion, but none of that matters. The project is about spending time well. It is about forgetting where we are and letting the final product emerge without the stress of a looming deadline. Sure, it needs to be finished, but instead of having a quick deadline, I decided this year to extend the deadline and invite students who finished their maps earlier to look up supporting images, draw a third map, find a current event that linked to their inquiry, or do something else that is rich and immersive in guiding the ways they're growing.

So, that's what I've learned, that's where I am.

Slowing down and holding space for the directions and inspirations of my students.

Taking a Risk (my first 10 minute vlog post)

This week I didn't have time to write for thirty minutes, so I thought about how I could hack the medium of my weekly reflection. I didn't have thirty minutes, but I DID have ten minutes to talk to myself about what I learned this week.

So, here I am taking a risk at 3:00 on a tired Thursday afternoon in my first ever Thursday 30 Vlog Post.

Howard Gardner and compounding grains of sand.

If I'm being honest, I often find myself questioning my impact. I wonder whether I'm doing enough, whether I could be doing something more, becoming something more, striving for bigger, greater things.

When I feel lost, the phrase I speak aloud most is, "I just don't know what I'm supposed to be doing."

And today, I thought about impact and about the ways impact is felt and experienced by those around us.

Today in World Cultures class, my students learned about "dumb barter," a method of silent trade employed in the west African Malinke Empire up until about 600 years ago. Instead of having my students take notes and study the activity, though, I had them act it out. 

One group of students was the gold-mining Wangara; another were the salt-bearing Berbers; and a third group were the Malinke, an ethnolinguistic group who lived along the Niger and Senegal Rivers.

Because the three groups shared no common language, they relied on drum beats to indicate trade practices, with the drums echoing up and down the river. 

So, as my 8th grade students pounded on tables, their classmates navigated a sea of chairs to find their way "up river" to engage in silent trade.

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During morning advisory a group of students was found "studying" for geography by putting together a collection of map puzzles I have in my room. 

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Meanwhile, later in the day, during English class, my students were invited to explore the nature and organization of a sestina, a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern.

They employed the sestina format in constructing chapter summaries of Chimamanda Adichie's novel, Purple Hibiscus. What, they asked themselves, should their six words be? Which words provide poetic richness while also providing textual legitimacy to Adichie's advancement of plot and theme?

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So, what then is the point? 

Ah, the point.

Well, the point relates to our impact and the way that our influence is compounded.

So, before I get to the point, a brief comment about compounding.

Imagine you are given a grain of sand on the day you are born. On each birthday, that grain of sand is doubled. On your third birthday you have four grains of sand, and on your fourth birthday you have eight, and so on. Well, by your 65th birthday, do you know how much sand you'll have?

All of it.

Like, literally all of it. You would have the Sahara, the Atacama, the Australian outback, the Thar, th Kalahari, the Mojave, all the beaches.

You would have all the sand in the world.

So, back to the point.

Yesterday I was inspired by a colleague who reminded me of the importance of Howard Gardner and providing opportunities to assess students and inspire students through novel means of engagement.

This colleague compounded that reality by sharing the insight with a group of upper school colleagues. 

Now, I have further compounded the impact of connecting multiple intelligence to my students by engaging them in acting and poetry, both creative expressions that are divergent from historic forms of assessment.

Don't get me wrong, neither of these tools was particularly unique or inspired...both were simple. Yet, at the very same time they both opened a door for students to walk through. Will I see my impact? Probably not. After all, all I did was hand each of my students a grain of sand.

But I can fall asleep knowing that when they left my class, my students were given a grain of sand. And tomorrow? Tomorrow, they just might wake to find those very grains have doubled overnight.