it should be a time for quiet reflection. Even though I am not teaching this summer, and will not again be with students for perhaps another 6 weeks.
And yet . . . a man I know slightly invited me to be the final speaker for the class of graduate students currently serving as educational assistants and in the process of becoming teachers. Originally I was to chat with them for around 45 minutes, and instead it became 90, and a few have since followed up by email. The experience reminded me how much of my life is focused on helping others to learn.
I met the professor years ago when I was teaching middle school - one of the women on our team considered him her most influential professor, and he visited our school. Later I explored doing a doctorate at Maryland until I found out that teaching in Maryland did not qualify me for instate tuition. Several of my fellow teachers have studied with him, some of my former students have studied with him. And then he saw me quoted in the Washington Post and invited me in to talk about the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action. That was the starting point, but we conversed about so much more.
That by itself would make me somewhat reflective on a quiet Saturday morning. What really makes me reflective is putting the house in order for an appraisal in hopes of getting our mortgage refinanced. Let me explain.
Between us my wife and I have six degrees. She has bachelors, masters and doctorate, and I have bachelors and two masters. Besides the subjects we have formally studied, we both have explored other subjects in some detail. That has always meant acquiring and reading books. Many, many, many books. Add to this our love of movies and of music and it should not be hard to picture a house overflowing with books, records, CDs, DVDS, videotapes, etc.
I cleaned out my study for the first time in about a decade: I need to refinish the floor today. In the process I went through folder after folder of papers from previous studies. Even were I to ever pick up my doctoral studies in education, journal articles from more than a decade ago are no longer relevant. Besides, both of us now have easy access to online versions of almost all of the journals from which they came.
Yet I found I could not simply toss the folders into the recycling bin. I found myself leafing through, remembering things I had read, and how they had influenced my thinking.
I similarly went through a large number of books. There are many I will never reread, and those have been put into crates to be given away or perhaps offered up at a garage sale. They, too, transported me back to the time when I read them. That is, those I actually finished. For a few I found that partway through they were not worth completing. They did not live up to expectations.
As with those books, also with some of the ideas I have had in the past, perhaps of the kind of work I might in the future do, or of pieces I thought I wanted to write. Many, many false starts, from which I learned important lessons about paths not to follow. As I reexperienced some of this I reflected upon what it means for me as a teacher. I have benefited from the opportunity to start down what turned out to be false paths. How can I provide equivalent learning experiences for my students? Do not we in school, even with our best intentions, attempt to cram so much in that there is insufficient time to explore side paths? I began this paragraph by mentioning the false paths upon which I started. But sometimes it is those side paths that become our real course, as teaching became mine. After all, I was a successful manager in computers when I had a chance conversation at a college reunion which lead me to begin exploring the possibility of becoming a teacher. When I first looked into it, I evaluated it by what I had to do and what I would earn, and the latter discouraged me. I put the idea aside until I had to go to court to get my father - beginning to fade from Alzheimer's - into custodial care. Surprisingly, that led me to reconsider what I was doing with my own life, leading in 1994 to my quitting my job and beginning studies to be a teacher.
I need time to reflect. At earlier points in my life one appeal of the monastic life was the idea that there was time for contemplation, reflection, stillness. I might spend a month or more in a monastic setting, living and working with the monks. Stripping life down to essentials somehow enabled me to see parts of my own life back in the world with greater clarity.
Let me share one experience from my first such visit. I had dropped out of my first doctoral program - in Musicology at Penn. I spent the spring as a teacher intern in a Quaker secondary school, an experience that years later would lead to my becoming a full-time teacher. I was spending the summer in Michigan at an Episcopalian Benedictine Monastery that the man now my father-in-law had suggested I visit. I had been there for more than five weeks when for reasons not worth discussing I suddenly had to return to the Philadelphia area where I lived. I flew from Kalamazoo to Detroit. I came in on the local (Michigan) side of the airport, switched to the other side and had an hour or more to kill before my flight. I went into a restaurant and ordered a sandwich and beer. And I was overwhelmed.
The monastery had visitors, but not so many I was used to having only a few people around, and in any conversation giving my compete attention to one person - for some reason even as one not a member of the monastic community I often served as someone who could listen and counsel others. Now I was in a busy restaurant. It was not only the sounds. IT was the people: there were too many, I was overwhelmed by what I perceived, I could not give full attention to any. Then I realized something: that in my ordinary life I was NOT that attentive to the persons before me, because I was so easily distracted by others, unless I focused. But when I focused I was also disconnecting myself from much of what was around me.
As a teacher I may have to focus on a particular student, but can in the classroom setting never do so to the exclusion of others. Thus if I must address a discipline situation I am never only addressing the student whose behavior is inappropriate. What I say and do inevitably has an impact on every other student in the room, then by word of mouth other students whom they know. Years later that led to an important lesson for a political candidate I was assisting, as I was able to explain to him how he acted towards one person was looked at by everyone else around. He might feel justified in being curt with someone who strongly disagreed with him, but he would then be perceived by others as being rude and that would hurt him. He could give his absolute attention to the person before him but could never forget that as a candidate what he was saying and doing was public fodder, not just for those watching but for those to whom they would communicate what they had experienced.
I stop writing. The windows are not open this morning - it has been hot and muggy. The Mount Vernon clock on the wall just outside our dining room ticks away, its pendulum going back and forth. One cat is curled up next to me, another comes down the stairs to me left, walks past and heads into the kitchen for a snack. Outside the early morning sounds of birds has died down and I hear the sound of the occasional car passing in front of our house. Soon, in perhaps 30 minutes, the normal sounds of a Saturday will begin as neighbors attempt to mow the lawns before the rains come. Above me is the rumble of a jet - National Airport is a few miles away, and planes may be either climbing or descending at a height only a few thousand feet above me.
This house is full of stuff. Some of it goes back to our respective childhoods - pictures, favorite items we have carried through our lives. Much is, as noted, the product of our studies and our intellectual interests. Too much is the result of inertia, an unwillingness to dispose of things accumulated during our combined 37 years together (as of September) and 111 years on earth.
Stuff does not define us, even as it may remind us of who we are and have been, and how we have gotten to where we now find ourselves.
The black cat next to me stirs, stretching out, exposing his belly and asking for it to be rubbed. I grant him his wish, then he rubs against me, settles back down, and goes back to sleep, purring all the while.
He didn't ask for much: some acknowledgment of his presence and his needs/desires. A small bit of recognition as the unique creature he is. Very much like many of my students, who crave that individual recognition. Very much like most people, who do not want to be anonymous, or just part of the background. Probably like every person in that airport restaurant in Detroit 37 years ago - yes, the summer just before Leaves and I began our relationship.
On the mantle a few feet a way is a picture of the two of us, much younger and somewhat lighter and less gray. We are dressed up. It was taken January 20, 1993, at an inaugural ball for the last Democratic President. I stop and wonder if we will live for another Democratic President after the current one.
On the walls above it are two things of very creative Calligraphy by an artist we first encountered perhaps two decades ago at the craft fair near Harper's Ferry. This is "stuff" but it is more. It is not just words, but artistic arrangements thereof. We have a number of her pieces. The larger one is the words from Ecclesiastes that are so famous about a time for every season. The smaller are words from Thoreau about living deliberately. The latter are words I first read in a leather bound volume in my pre-teens, when I first devoured On Walden Pond. Too often later in life I did not take the time to be deliberate about what I did or said. Yet reading those words began a process, one which in part led to my time in monasteries, to my habit of reflection.
And the words from the Bible? They connect with the Thoreau. Even as I must be deliberate, I also recognize that there are times when I should reflect and times when I must act. There are times for politics and times for the cat like the one next to me.
It is a Saturday morning. Shortly the rental place will open. I need to rent a floor buffer to polish our wood floors with paste wax. I too will have to disturb the morning silence outside with the sounds of my electric mower - the rain of the past few evenings has given a boost to the growth of the grass, and I want the house making a good impression for the appraiser. When I go outside I may well see the local wild rabbits now plaguing the vegetable gardens of our neighbors. They are being rabbits, attempting to survive in our semi-urban neighborhood, avoiding loose dogs, cats, and the occasional coyote.
A black paw comes over one arm, and a warm tongue caresses. I acknowledge him, but now must get on with the day. There is a time, and I must be deliberate in my intentions.
Perhaps later, when what I must accomplish today is finished, I can again reflect. Perhaps even as I work I can be attentive to how I word. St. Benedict of Nursia and Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection would both approve if I do.
Thanks for taking the time to read these words i have shared.
Peace.