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.

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.

Not Enough Time

Lately I've been falling asleep wishing I had more time.

I have to force myself shut off the lights, run the dishwasher, clomp upstairs, brush my teeth, and crawl into bed.

There is simply so much to do.
My mind is abuzz.
There. Just. Isn't. Enough. Time.

As I confront the stark reality of time, my management of it, and that ceaseless trail of stuff-I-have-to-do-or-want-to-do-or-want-to-think-about-if-only-I-had-an-extra-hour-to-myself, I am struck by the reality that this plight is shared by my students.

They, too, don't have enough time.

Not enough time for the valuable conversations that draw them deeper to their friends; not enough time to enjoy dinner; not enough time to read To Kill a Mockingbird and really get something out of it; not enough time to discuss politics, help set the table, wash dishes, walk the dog, sit in the grass, or ask a grandparent to tell them a story.

Not enough time to think a thought
that is theirs alone.

There just isn't enough time.

Now when I use the word "time," I'm not referring to life on earth being too short; it's about the hours in the day. I could definitely use 26, and I think my students could too.

Yet what would falling asleep feel like in a 26 hour day? Would I have gotten everything done? Were I able to actually complete all the tasks required of me--if I'd crossed off each of my TO DOs with a fat, black Sharpie--would I really be able to relax?

My creeping suspicion is "no."

Because my students and the teachers I surround myself with--my colleagues, my Personal Learning Network of engaged educators near and far--are curious. They are passionate. And a casualty of this passion-fueled curiosity is that there are always more ideas than there are opportunities to see them through.

Our thought lives are works in progress...they are rough drafts. So we need to be forced to find comfort in the messy, the incomplete, the process-driven.

See, that's what the best classrooms and schools do: they are idea factories. They are places where hallway conversations spiral into questions about the how? the why? and the what if?

Deep within each idea we have rests the potential to become one of Kerouac's "mad ones." The ones about whom he writes, in chapter 1 of On the Road:

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

This is the ceiling for a school, a classroom, a relationship between student and teacher: it is a ceiling made of the intellectual imaginary that provides opportunities for questions.

Back to those 26 hours.

I've convinced myself that 26 hours in the life of a mad roman candle person would still feel infinitesimally brief. And, frankly, if Monday granted us sufficient enough time to finish every thought, complete every idea, and summarize every conversation, what would Tuesday hold? 

Tuesday would be far more boring than any of these "mad ones" could bear.

Whatever we're able to finish in a day has to be "good enough." And good enough is GOOD. Good enough is unfinished. It's ugly. It's half-baked. It needs polishing. 

Time management is a skill, but being at peace with good enough is, too. 

Tonight I'll try to fall asleep grateful that I crave my waking hours, that I want more hours with my family, AND with my work, AND with my own thoughts. I'm jealous for time because, like Kerouac, "I'm desirous of everything at the same time."

May we help our students find that for which they are "mad to live" and mad to learn. Because that is good. That is enough.

And that is why I'm hitting send right now...because this blog post needs polishing. But it's good enough.