Some memorable take-aways from a summer of reading, living and learning.
1. Biting someone will get their attention.
Little Danny was sent to my office on the third day of summer school at Yancy Elementary where I was serving as “acting” principal for a couple weeks. In a last ditch effort to get the attention of a little boy who wasn’t sharing the ball, Danny bit his classmate on the arm. His strategy was unsuccessful. Danny was stoic as I talked with him about what he did, but he melted into a scared seven-year-old when I told him that I was going to have to tell his Mom about what happened. He cried, and in a moment that surprised me as much as it surprised him, I cried a little with him. It occurred to me in that split second with a painful sharpness that Danny’s strategy was partly successful. It got him the attention that he obviously needed, but the outcome wasn’t what he’d hoped for. It’s a painful lesson we all learn and re-learn and it’s never easy.
In the next ten minutes, Danny and I got to know each other and by the time he went back to class, we had both learned a lot about how to let someone know you need some help with something. As he was leaving the office he turned back to me and said, “Do you know what I want to be when I grow up?”
“No, I don’t,” I answered.
“Me neither,” said Danny. “I’m still waiting for the dream.”
“What dream is that?”
“The one that tells me what I’m going to be when I grow up.”
Me too, Danny. Me too.
2. Every adult should attend a kid’s swim meet before deciding to have children.
When my daughter received her first ribbon for the freestyle heat in which she swam, I was immediately drawn to the time. 1.53.08 seconds. That was it. Less than two minutes. She was absolutely beaming about 1.53.08 seconds of her life. Suddenly, the four-and-a-half hours we spent looking for her goggles, packing towels and snacks, wading through the mob of parents, standing in the glaring pool-side sun and trying to spot her amid all the identical swimsuits and caps seemed completely worth it. I’m not saying I’ll be heartbroken if she decides she never wants to swim competitively again, but I learned the importance of that metaphysical zoom lens that good parenting and good teaching requires. Kids don’t have a “big picture” or an “agenda” or “comprehensive learning plan.” 1.53.08 is often all that matters to the kids. The other four-and-a-half hours of helping them get there is our most important work.
3. Silence is sometimes the appropriate response.
Abstract artist Mark Rothko was always honored by the lack of response that his paintings evoked from viewers. “Silence,” he was once quoted as saying, “is sometimes the appropriate response.” I’ve been awed into silence many times this summer, whether it was listening to the crickets of a mid-July night, gazing into a valley from a mountain train bridge, or just watching my wife make dinner. It has come to my attention that in our bustling, technological world, we have become conditioned to expect immediate response, constant feedback, and automatic reply to our every expression and inquiry. What we have gained, to quote Edward Albee, is loss. We’ve lost our respect for the silence that is sometimes the best answer. Can we teach our children to enjoy the silence of an awed moment, when no words adequately express our wonder?
4. We’re still preaching to the choir, but the choir is getting bigger
I enjoyed being at Edustat University’s conference in Charlottesville this summer. I felt the thrill that’s always present when enthusiastic people of like mind come together to share their ideas. There was a tension, however, running throughout the three days of listening and thinking through the challenges of re-imagining our profession, stemming primarily from the seldom spoken fact that a disconnect exists between what we as educational professionals know must happen in our classrooms and what the strictures of NCLB require of us. Yet I was encouraged by the turnout, by the eager collaboration between teachers, administrators, and even superintendents. I could feel the old traditional boundary walls that separate theory and practice start to tremble and crack. The weight of change is buckling the bulwark of status quo and while we are still to some extent preaching to the choir, the choir is getting bigger every year.
5. It’s not how you start or how fast you go. Finishing is what matters.
My family, along with several other families, took a biking trip to Cass, West Virginia, which was quite a risk considering that my six-year-old son was still on training wheels. Living in a hilly neighborhood of narrow streets, biking is not something my children have had much opportunity to do. Yet there we were, setting out on an 11-mile round trip along the Greenbrier River to a scenic swimming spot nestled in the mountains.
At the outset, my son was having none of it. He concluded that his bike was too small, his training wheels rolled too slow, and there wasn’t any point to trying to keep up with the group who took off up the trail and left us behind. He threw down his bike and sat in the middle of the path to pout.
“Look,” I told him, “we don’t have to keep up with them. Why don’t you and I ride to that tree over there and sit in the shade.” He agreed and so we did and when we got to the tree I challenged him to ride up to that rock around the bend where we could see the river better. And so we did. And thus we carried on for 5-and-a-half miles, one marker at a time, riding to this tree, to that clearing, to the bottom of that hill.
There were times when I would say to my son, “I don’t think we’re going to make it to the swimming hole, Dude. Maybe we should stop and wait for them to come back.” Magic words. He peddled faster and further until finally, after long slow hours, we crested the top of the hill to find our friends swimming in the river. When they saw my boy approaching on his little bike with it’s little rattling training wheels, there were shouts of surprise and joy and pride that will likely stay in his little head for the rest of his life. He finished the trip. We finished it together. And ever since then I’ve been looking for the next tree to ride up to.
6. Thinking critically about critical thinking – what were we thinking?
I spend several days over the summer working with colleagues on creating a rubric that teachers could use to assess whether their students were thinking critically in their work. In the process, we engaged in semantic exercises that came close to generating an entirely new language – one that only we would be able to speak. The longer we worked on it, the more I found myself thinking about what would happen if we gave this project to our students? Is it possible that the result would create the rubric and the product to assess at the same time? Is anybody ready to go down that rabbit hole? I think we should be. Do we underestimate how critically our students already think on an everyday basis? Given the complexity of the social landscape they navigate (mostly successfully), I think we often do.
7. Teaching: sometimes it’s a waltz, sometimes it’s a mosh pit
In their book, the Tao of Mentoring, Chungliang Al-Huang and Jerry Lynch expound upon the idea that the wise mentor never distinguishes between teaching and learning and that while one engages in either of these practices they are automatically taking part in the other. The healthy student/teacher relationship is like an intricate dance in which the partners take turns leading and following, trusting themselves and their partners to know when it’s time to change roles.
RELATIONSHIP is what the Taoist teacher stresses and what we, whether teachers with our students, coaches with our teachers, or parents with our own children, must keep at the center of what we do. If the dance of education is not for the deeper actualization of all of us in relation to any of us, it is for nothing.
Here’s to another year of teaching and learning and dancing and laughing. Good luck everybody. And be careful out there!