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………

Hunting For Mushrooms While Cursing Smokey Bear

Daughter 3 and I went hunting for mushrooms today.  The flip of a calendar page from April to May coincides with morel mushrooms pushing through last autumn’s leaf litter to make themselves available for harvest.  Apparently the ‘shrooms missed the memo about May arriving; in two hours of walking we found wild ginger and fiddleheads on ferns (two common sights during morel season) but no mushrooms.

We had a great time together, which is almost impossible NOT to do when walking in the woods, so this could easily become a  “journey is more important than the destination” kind of writing.  It won’t.  I noticed myself moving through the woods exactly the way I do when I hunt for deer or grouse, silently sliding through brush one slow step at a time as if the mushrooms might scatter upon hearing me; could’ve turned this into a dissertation on the need for stealth in the hunt for all things.  Won’t do that either.  No, I blog today about a misunderstood and destructive enemy to nature – Smokey Bear.  My motivation for such a rant?  The lone wood tick I found on my shirt this evening.  Confused yet?

Smokey implores us to prevent forest fires while rattling off statistics about millions of acres this and thousands of dollars that…which is pretty impressive for a bear.  While Smokey’s intentions (Save the forests!  Save nature!) are honorable, he seems to forget, or ignore, that fire was a part of nature long before man came along and started using it to burn everything up.  Fire is one of nature’s cleansers, ridding the forest understory of brush and weeds that choke out desirable vegetation.  The absence of fire clutters a forest or grassland with dead, dying, and decaying plant matter, all of which becomes fire fuel and stokes the massive wildfires we see today.

If left unburned, these unhealthy and unsightly tracts of land become habitat loved by pests such as mice and ticks.  Yes, I know – songbirds and small game and scores of other creatures use the same habitat; back off, already.  The number of threatened and endangered songbirds climbs annually, though, so is the unburned habitat really helping the birds?  And many small game species are highly adaptable.  What really develops by “preventing” forest fires is not a healthy forest, but a breeding ground for Lyme disease.  Mice carry it, ticks transmit it. Smokey enables it.  Thanks a lot, Bear.

Ok, I’ll ease up on Smokey while I shift to my true objective in this writing:  to remind myself, and you, valued reader, that no one thing or action in the world stands alone.  In the timeless words of Chief Seattle, “All things are bound together.  All things connect.”  We can use the imagery of ripples on the water from a single stone, the idea of paying it forward, or the simple truth that Smokey is killing us all with Lyme disease – what we choose to do or not do has consequences far beyond what we can ever know.  The raw power of our every move is…..well, it’s something.  Phenomenal?  Daunting?  Overwhelming?  Exhilarating?

As we move through life riding the choices we make we can make those choices from two opposite viewpoints:  one that looks inward and one that looks out.  There are times one or the other may be necessary; which viewpoint do we choose the most?  We know the folks who look inward more often than out.  They are the selfish, the me-firsters, the “what’s in it for me” types who suck from the best but give nothing to the rest (I’m not sure what that means but it sounds too good to delete).  Like Smokey, they feel justified in taking care of self first and steering clear of hot spots.  They fail to see the interconnectedness of their actions as they leave an expanse of fire fuel infested with disease after they take and take and take and never give.  They don’t see themselves as the pebble making waves; they stand on the shore and complain about the rough water that keeps lapping at their feet.

We also know the visionaries, those who anticipate the reactions to their actions and see the waves rolling away rather than towards.  The ones who understand some occasional small fires are healthier than one big blaze, and when the last flames are squelched can see and foster the healthy new growth that follows.  These are the people who put self second, third, or even last for the betterment of all, having faith the process of connectedness will turn one giving gesture into a grand result they might never see.

Go back and look at the first sentence in this post…..go ahead, I’ll wait here………now, read the last sentence of the previous paragraph again.  Do the two connect?  Not a bit.  Was there a clear path from one to the other?  I hope so.  Did I plan this when I wrote that first sentence?  Of course…….not.  But that's life - an unending tapestry of actions and results that can be traced from one point to another but not linked directly.  We are the result of the choices we make, and the choices we make are the result of who we are.  We can be the pebble making waves or stand on the shore and watch the waves roll over us.  Unlike the pebble we have the power to choose where we make our waves, their intensity, and their direction. 

As we begin a new month and the mushrooms refuse to grow, ask yourself:  Am I making waves or standing on the shore whining about the waves?  Am I “in it” for me or for others?  What were the results of my actions yesterday?  Last week?  Last month?  How could I make some waves today?  This week?  This month?  Is who I am today who I want to be tomorrow?  Next week?  Next month?

The future starts right now.  Connect with it.  Be sure to check for ticks when you’re done.