Home Is Where The Other Places Aren't

I went home this weekend. 

I’ve been thinking about the concept of “home” quite a bit recently, with regard to both my personal and professional self.  As it usually does, my thinking turned into searching which led to reading, which finally led to discovery.  I came across an online forum driven by the lead question “What do you consider ‘home’?”  A simple response in the middle of many rambling oratories became the end of my search:

Home is the place you would go if given the choice to live anywhere.

Aldo Leopold had his Shack in Wisconsin, Superman his Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic, I’ve got my parents’ farm in the northern tier of Minnesota – the place I would choose out of all to spend every day that I could.  I reference Mr. Leopold as my muse in the development of my land ethic, though I would fool no one into believing my understanding of nature resembles his.  Nor do I resemble Superman (“Blunderdud” is a more fitting moniker most days), but I often refer to my parents’ place as my Fortress of Solitude…the one place in the world I can escape the sights, sounds, and presence of the world.

The Farm is a sprawling 140-acre parcel of land that sits at the end of a dead end road and is surrounded by several thousand acres of undeveloped wilderness that is open to public use but easily accessible by only us.  Simply put, it’s perfect.  My parents’ land is mostly open, the surrounding land completely wooded.  The fields are a mix of flatlands and rolling hills, and a stream runs through the middle of the property.  Over the last 15 years my dad and I have planted roughly 25,000 tree seedlings, which are now big enough to provide cover for a variety of critters and birds.

The majority of my limited time on the Farm is spent harvesting something, developing habitat, or working on parent-driven projects.  This weekend was divided between searching for morel mushrooms on Saturday and deer farming on Sunday.  Exhaustion and sunburn are signs of a productive weekend.

The mushroom hunt took my dad and I from the Dinner Pail Road straight east to Vance’s Swamp by way of the North Walking Ridge.  A few ‘shrooms were found near the Crossroads deer stand and a couple more by the Hangman’s Tree, but pickin’s were slim compared to other years.  After a couple of hours we headed west towards Spring Crick (pronounced “crick”, a northern term for a small stream) where again we found very few mushrooms in our first hours of searching.  When I finally got to my go-to patch above the Slaughterhouse Ravine the sun was dipping towards the treetops, but the ‘shrooms were standing tall.  As darkness fell I stumbled out of the woods with several pounds of morels and five hours of walking behind me.  Dad had headed for home much earlier and was stunned to see me arrive with my “catch”.

Sunday morning I headed to the Bald Knob, my second favorite hunting area on The Farm, to start cleaning up our trails that were littered with debris from some late summer logging last year.  Is it odd that I never bother to rake my yard to remove leaves or sticks, but I spend hours raking woods trails?  Don’t answer, I already know.  While I raked the woods my dad disked our deer food plot on the Sand Flat.  A healthy food plot combined with the fresh cutting on the Knob…I’m almost shuddering as I think about how thick the deer will be in that area this fall.  Like shooting fish in a bucket.

As I worked today I thought of how I might write this blog entry; what I’ve written was in the plan but now that I see it on a screen I notice all the names.  Trust me, you’ve read but a glimpse of the named spots on The Farm.  Most people want to find a place where everybody knows their name; I like going where there isn’t anybody and every place has a name.  I’ve returned from The Farm to write this in my house that isn’t home, in the city that I’ll never be from, in a part of the world I’ve never loved…and that’s ok, because The Farm will always be waiting to welcome me back home.

The End Is Near

The best Tweet I sent yesterday contained one of my favorite motivational quotes, penned by one of my favorite philosophizers.  Take a gander:

The best e-mail I sent yesterday contained a reply to the following query:  “What was the reason you became a teacher?”  The sender, a high school freshman (Hi Isaac!), has plans to become President someday and is already constructing his education platform.  Wanting to be on good terms with the future Prez I replied with three reasons:  1) June,  2) July,  3) August.  I did go on to give a legitimate answer that I can’t, for the life of me, remember, but how can I not be excited about some extended time away from an active alarm clock?

We teachers will try to bluff our way past the fact we get a huge vacation – we tell you about summer professional development, summer curriculum writing, wrapping up the past year until well into June and prepping for the next year in August – but I’m telling you right here, right now:  we get three glorious months off!  Truth be told, if I could change anything about school structure I would create year-round school with multiple short breaks rather than the antiquated summer break we have now.  But until I can make that change I’m gonna enjoy the living daylights out of summer vacation!!

I’m troubled, though, by the way we approach the approaching time off.  I do mean “we”; I’m as guilty as the next teacher of the trends that trouble me.  For instance, much testing is done in late April and early May.  We drive ourselves to fully prepare our students for these benchmark assessments and when the tests are over…..we let out a big sigh and coast through the final weeks of the school year.  I have watched classrooms shut down in early May, which gives those students four months away from quality teaching.  It’s a bit hypocritical for us to complain about the emphasis on testing while treating “the test” as more important than the final month of instruction.  This practice of gearing up for the spring assessments only to spend the following weeks winding down gives students the clear message that “the test” is the most important reason to be in school, despite teachers’ cries to the contrary.

Someone somewhere must have decided to put an alphabet countdown activity on Pinterest, ‘cause now everyone everywhere has decided to use the final 26 days of school to constantly remind students that school is nearly over.  Never mind the atrophy of our collective creativity this constant copycatting is accelerating,

(C’mon people, think for yourselves just a little.  With barely an effort I’ve got most of my own alphabet countdown ready for next year.  I’m already looking forward to ‘E is for Enema’ day, and I’d better start gathering supplies for ‘Making Moonshine with Mom’ on M day.)

why on Earth do we glorify the impending end of learning…..FOR 26 DAYS?!!?  These countdowns clearly communicate that school is something to be endured, a sentence that will be lifted once we get to the letter Z.  Teachers’ visible excitement about the impending end also conveys a message, one that says, “Hey kids, we spend most of the year acting like school is important….but really we just want it to be over, too.”  To make matters worse we gather after school each day and shake our heads at the lack of focus the kids have, or comment about how “they’ve already shut down”, or we simply throw our hands in the air and declare it useless to try teaching anything because “the kids know summer is coming so they’ve stopped trying to learn.”  We come dangerously close to giving the inmates the keys to the asylum.

Might we, and our students, be better served by approaching the end of a school year with the mindset of my Tweet from yesterday?  No, no, no – I’m not implying we spend the last month dressed in black and wander around muttering lamentations of mourning…although I wouldn’t mind trying that…and I usually dress in black most days as it is, so…  No, I’m suggesting we shift our thoughts and actions about the end from excitement to urgency.  Make the most out of each day with structure and routine and lessons and application.  Replace “countdowns to the end” with “this is how many chances we have left for learning together!”  Treat testing day as just another opportunity to show what you know and then come back the next day and teach the heck out of whatever needs taught.  Whether it’s living our life or teaching our students, we get a limited number of days to do both – we should make them full, make them productive.

Teaching is a tough, tough job and we earn every relaxing day of every vacation we get.  But teachers, we need to be careful not to start those vacations too soon.  Now, I need to get back to my alphabet countdown…..let’s see, Vasectomy day, Wart-removal day, X-Files day, Yizkor day………