Quiet Time….?

Yesterday at church we got the annual (and very good) homily about going inside of oneself during Advent to find God in the ‘quiet’.  As a teacher I can tell you that this time of year is anything but quiet.  We have events scheduled for our students every day this week, and the semester ends soon.

I worry about the ones for whom the ‘quiet’ is disturbed by thoughts of despair, broken families, overheard financial problems discussed by struggling parents, and more.  I read a great deal about student problems in their writing, and their problems seem especially close to the surface this year.

I love the season of Advent and the quiet waiting. Easter is supposed to be the most important feast of the liturgical year, but Advent followed by Christmas is my favorite. I will listen for God in the quiet of solitude that is so important to me, but I will also listen for my ‘kids’  in the chaos of this time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and try not to be too distracted to hear what they need someone to hear.

Growing Hopefully….Hopefully Growing?

Recently my wife and I experienced one of those wonderful moments in parenthood known as ‘an incident’.  The incident was complicated by the fact that it concerned a child not ours by birth, but nevertheless ours by choice and definitely one we are responsible for in terms of safety and well-being among other things.

The incident was not nearly as interesting as my wife’s comment to me “ YOU WOULD HAVE NEVER ACTED THAT WAY WITH ONE OF OUR KIDS WHEN THEY WERE GROWING UP!” Her comment came to me with hints and flavors of frustration, irritation, and most of all, bewilderment.  She is exactly right, as usual.

In my defense, I am not particularly proud of how I handled some things in my parenting career, and I have no hopes that I will handle every ‘incident’ perfectly during the remainder of my parenting career.  Nevertheless, I DO have hopes that perhaps, just perhaps, I handled this one better and that I too, am ‘growing up’. As one favorite movie line of mine says, “Hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things.” With that in mind, I’ll try to keep growing in hope, and,  hopefully, growing.

A Tale of Two Men…

Being at the age when you know you have more yesterdays than tomorrows makes you more reflective, or it should.  One looks back on a life and has to honestly evaluate the small triumphs and tragedies that make up the pages of a life story.  This is, perhaps, especially true, the closer one gets to retirement.

I know of two men who are retiring at the end of this school year.  One of them loves his job, one of them hates it. One of them will be missed by everyone, and one of them will not be missed much at all.  One is humble, appreciates his chance to work with kids and worries about being missed; the other is not-so-humble, and does not seem to like anything associated with education, especially the children he serves.  I have never heard one of them say anything negative, and I have never heard the other say anything positive.

One of these men has lived Thoreau’s ‘well-examined life’.  He will be missed, even though he does not think so, and he has touched countless lives, ever so quietly.  I hope in the time I have left I will become more like him.

Paper Anxiety….

I have been ‘going to college’ since 1975, and I am not near finished with what I want to learn.  There is , however, a price for that learning, and I am not talking about tuition.  I have ‘paper anxiety’.  Once upon a time it was ‘test anxiety’ but in my areas of academic interest, papers ARE the test of knowledge.

This means not only do you have to know something, you have to be able to write as well, and therein lies the problem.

Usually when you write, they tell you to ‘know your audience’.  The audience for my papers is someone I have never seen, and sometimes only talked to once via a conference call.  The audience doesn’t know me, and I don’t know them.

They also say ‘write what you know’; unfortunately, I am writing to show that I DO know, and I don’t know if I DO know until the reader of the paper gets back to me to tell me what I do and don’t know. Confused? Welcome to my writing world.

In my last class I wrote the most difficult paper I have ever authored.  I followed the usual mantra of any writer going through the creative process “Be good, be good, BEGONE!” As I finished it, I thought it the worst thing I have ever written, but I think that about everything I write.

I got the paper back a few days ago.  The grade?  Doesn’t matter, I am already sweating the next two for the current course. Maybe I should just make a plan to graduate so I don’t have to go through this, but then who would I write for?

Smartboard? Smart Teacher?

A few days ago I received a little toy for my classroom and there is it is before me, six and one-half feet of ’smartboard’, a Promethean smartboard to be exact.  Classicists will no doubt remember that Prometheus brought fire (read ‘knowledge’) to humankind.  He was also thoroughly punished for it as I recall.

The educational world being what it is I am amused at the decision process that delivered the new toy to my playground.  Was I the most ‘tech-savvy’? N-o-o-0.  Was I perhaps one of the ‘best teachers’? Don’t think so. Was it maybe because I was a favorite of the ‘powers that be’? God prevent such a thing!

I received a smartboard for no other reason than that it fit into my classroom.  Yep, ‘no other place to put it, so you get it’ I was told.  Now I am the envy of the teachers who did not have the right fitting rooms, and the delight of the students who now have a whole new reason for asking ‘can we write on your board?’ 

If the truth be known, the board is no different from a piece of chalk, albeit more fun and less dusty.  It is a tool that neither makes me a better teacher, nor a worse.  If it improves my teaching somehow, it will be worth it I suppose.  At the worst, it is a great way to watch movies with a killer speaker system!

Loadin’ or Totin’?

I am supposed to write a 15-20 page essay on what I have learned about spirituality and, in part, how it has affected my life.  A blog is much too confined a space to take a walk down that very long road, but I think it comes down to a few things, one in particular.

If someone is truly spiritual, no matter what aspect that spirituality assumes, the spirituality must be manifested in action. Love is an action, not an emotion, and a truly spiritual person should act in a loving way.

Loving for me, includes refraining from gossiping about, thinking of, or treating anyone or anything in an unjust way.  It is remarkable how little I realize how often I make judgments about how others live or act until I try NOT to make those judgments. Try it if you don’t believe me!

Love is an act. and it includes thoughts, words, and deeds. Everyone carries a burden, a cross if you will, in life.  Some burdens are more visible than others, but we all have them. Simply ask, ‘do my acts, thoughts, words, deeds, add to a person’s load, or help them to carry it?” I suspect that not only do we add to others’ loads, we add to our own far more often than we realize. So, are you helping to ‘tote’ a person’s burden, or just loading  it?

Coming Home…

The wonderful world of public education has some strange notions.  Among these oddities is the idea that a male teacher should, sooner or later, ‘move UP’ into administration because these positions pay more, have more, power, etc. I followed such a path several years ago.

Another strange idea is that you can ‘never go back’ to the classroom because such a trip would not only mean a pay cut, but would also signify something unmanly in not caring about power, authority, etc.

I have been to the “mountaintop” and had my own office, where I could avoid teachers and students alike, to do ‘more important things’. I found it to be rather cold, barren, and windy… very windy.

Now I have come home.  I have three classes of freshmen who need a little instruction in English and a little bit more instruction in what it means to be a responsible adult, nothing unusual there and well-worth my time. They  are a blessing to me.

I also have three classes of juniors taking English 11, aka ‘American Lit’ thus combining my favorite area in literature with my favorite age group. Their presence in my class this week convinces me of the presence of grace in the world.

I am in the sweet position of being a first year teacher with twenty-four years of experience in education.  I also have the pleasure of proving that you can, indeed, ‘go home again’.

Yes, yes, I know, cynics may point out that it’s only the first week of school and let’s see how long this lasts. Well, any house needs work from time to time to make it livable, but not every house is a home. My office was a ‘very, very fine house’ but my classroom is a home.

Wonder of wonders….

Last night at approximately 6:05 P.M. MDT I was ‘channel flippin’ with the remote. On MSNBC Keith Openmymouth was pontificating about all the wrongs of the current health care plan. Over on Fox, Bill NotLikely was doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING! Perhaps someday the lion really will lie down with the lamb….

The Last Crusader….

You can never just ‘go back to school’ if you are a teacher.  First you must survive the agony of something called ‘in-service’; a series of meetings and events designed to so annoy you that you are giddy with joy when all you have to deal with is just students and instruction.

One of the things to be endured is a meeting of the local teachers’ association (a union by any other name) during which the doors are closed and commiserations are shared about how, once again, the teachers were shafted in the latest contract negotiations.

Due to the economy and the ill-advised comments of our governor, who said he gave every district enough to give every teacher a minimum of a $1500 raise (we got $300) the meeting was a little testier than normal.  It was then, in the midst of the choruses of ‘we wuz robbed!’ I had an epiphany: I don’t care.

Not only do I not really care about the negotiations ( I took an $8,000 decrease just to go back to the classroom) I don’t care about much of anything, not any more, not if it calls for anger.

From childhood on I had been a crusader willing to fight for justice (usually mine) at the drop of a hat.  I was proud at fighting the good fight against all the odds and I reveled in a good dust-up.  Not any more.

In the last six to eight years I have fought two mighty battles, one in my professional life, which I lost.  The other was in my personal life, and I might have won that one although I am not sure and I might never know for sure.

Those two fights had a kenotic effect on me; there is no more to give for crusades against all odds. I am NOT ‘burned out’ but my natural inclination to fight anybody anywhere in the name of what is ‘right’ is gone.

Perhaps I fought too many fights, literally and figuratively.  Maybe I realized I wasn’t so sure what was ‘right’ anymore.  Maybe I got older, wiser, or both.  The ‘fight’ yesterday over a few dollars made me realize I have fought my last crusade.

With a Little Static Please….

I have a widescreen TV with several HD options.  I have a satellite radio which brings things in ‘crystal clear’ although the days of using crystals in radios is long past. And yet… my favorite way to follow baseball games is at night, in bed, with an AM radio complete with static.  My wife thinks I am crazy.

Many, many years ago I went to elementary school in California and I was devoted to the Dodgers.  There was no cable TV then, nor were there mega-packages on the local TV that covered every game. We used ‘transistor’ radios which were the ultimate in cool to have hanging out of your pocket.  They still played day games, and double-headers then, and every group of neighborhood boys had at least one radio at hand. If we were very good our teachers might let us listen to the World Series when they still played day games.

We followed the local team then, we had no choice, and loyalties were fierce.  At night, we all knew how to listen with the volume just right, and with the antenna adjusted just so, to keep our moms from catching us.

Inevitably with AM, the signal might fade in or out randomly, or a distant storm might cause a little static.  These little moments of being out of touch were just added drama.  They were little segues in the story. What happened?  Did he get a hit or strike out? Some of the most magical moments of my childhood came with a radio and the voice of Vin Scully.

I grew older and lost contact with the local team when I moved to Nebraska where football is king and there were no stations carrying baseball.  Finally, much later in life, everything came together, cable TV, satellite radio, and the addition of a team into my local market. Following my beloved baseball is easier than ever.

And yet, nothing is still better than listening to the boys of summer on a static-filled AM station in bed, perhaps with the sound of crickets outside if it hasn’t been too hot, and the windows are open. If my wife is right, and she usually is, about this being ‘crazy’, there are worse kinds of insanity.