it must be time for my normal Saturday morning reflection on teaching, life and everything else.
I don't know which bothers me more, that the recent Republican debates have not discussed education, or the policies of the Obama administration that I see as destructive.
I am reminded of something a former National Teacher of the Year wrote. Anthony Mullen once got frustrated being in a room full of political types and consultants talking about education "reform" who for the most part ignored him, until finally they asked him what he thought. He then wondered aloud why his opinion was not asked about improving medical outcomes, since he had about as much expertise on medical matters as they did on education. They did not respond well to his words.
On Tuesday I will see if at the local level things can be different. Our Superintendent is having one of several meetings he will hold with teachers. Each school in our immediate area was invited to send one teacher to a 90 minute meeting with the Superintendent and his top assistants. I am actually not the selectee of our school, in large part because I am increasingly likely to retire at the end of the year - the woman picked is actually my former student teacher!. But the President of the union was asked to select 5 additional teachers and he asked me, surprisingly during a phone call in which I first informed him I was resigning as lead union rep for our building (I have too much else on my plate at this point). The Superintendent knows me and my work, and several of his assistants who will be there are people with whom i have worked. I'm not sure what will be accomplished, as we have been given no agenda to help prepare us, but at least it is an attempt to include the voices of teachers as policy is being discussed.
I mentioned that I am increasingly likely to retire. I have no idea if I will be accepted either for the doctoral program at Harvard to which I have applied, or for the fellowship at Columbia to which I have also applied. It might be both, it might be neither. But the process of applying has helped me think through seriously what I want to do with the rest of my life. I am as I write this less than 4 months from my 66th birthday, and less than 1 from when my first Social Security check will be deposited in my account. That helps make more pertinent the reflections about my future.
The combination of the increasing pace of the political season, the possible impending approach of the end of my teaching career, the concerns about my own future and the future of this country - this is the context in which i write this morning.
Because we have chosen not to have biological children of our own, I have been able to be a very good teacher. Seriously. I have had the time and the energy to put in what is often 12 hour days, to turn around over 170 papers or tests in a day or a weekend, to engage in extensive contact with parents and even with students outside of the classroom.
It has been rewarding, as it was this week, when two current students asked for recommendations from me for summer internships.
Teaching young people has helped keep me younger than I might otherwise feel, for which I am exceedingly grateful.
Helping them make sense of the world around them gives me a focus - and a concern - for the world in which I too live: I cannot be detached, or unconcerned.
But teaching is also incredibly draining, when done properly. It is time consuming in ways many outside of teaching families simply do not understand. That is why increasingly teachers have resorted to doing "grade-ins." What, might you ask, is that? A group of teachers will gather in a very public place, perhaps at a Mall, and sit there all evening, or all Saturday, grading student papers.
I have written about this in the past. It was part of one of the first pieces I got published in local papers, more than 11 years ago, titled Among school children, class size does matter. You might take a look at it. In the years since i have often had more than the 171 students I had then. This year, as I write it, I have 175 on my roles, although one has ceased coming to school. That is far too many. The late Ted Sizer strongly suggested that as secondary school teaches we should not have more than 85, a number less than half my current load. I think how much I could ensure that they participated in discussions (hard to do with 33 or more students in a classroom when the class should be a seminar). I cannot help them with their writing the way I would like, because it is simply too time consuming.
The mere act of taking time to post things online as I often do sometimes makes me feel as if I am cheating my students: should not I keep that time to focus on what I do as a teacher? At least this morning's posting is about teaching and education directly. Often what I write is not, at least not directly.
But I teach government and politics. i want my students to be knowledgeable and empowered, so that they can make choices about their own degree of participation. I model that.
I also know that I cannot write about nor lobby for education unless I can place it in the larger context of the issues that face this nation. As I involve myself in issues, inevitably I find I want to engage with others, and as a shy person that is most easily accomplished through the keys and screen of my laptop.
Memorial Day weekend I will return to Haverford College for the 45th reunion of my original class, 1967. I am for the third consecutive reunion on the organizing committee, although my participation is somewhat limited, because the conference calls are usually at 8:30 in the morning, when my school day has just begun. I have been in touch with classmates encouraging them to attend. I also reached out to a couple of women from the parallel class at Bryn Mawr, hoping they would also be coming - we have one joint event. One I most wanted to see, Joan Borysenko, the well-known author, will not be able to, but we hope to get together at some time before the 50th. The planning and the reaching out has occasioned a different kind of reflection, a looking back, one that sometimes has me wondering "what if" - what if I had made different choices, then, or in the many years since.
Haverford's top award is to an alumnus is the Haverford Award, which supports and demonstrates the College's expressed concern for the application of knowledge to socially useful ends. It seeks to identify, reward and focus public attention on those alumni/ae who best reflect Haverford's concern with the uses to which they put their knowledge, humanity, initiative, and individuality. Ten years ago I strongly suggested a classmate, Dan Serwer, then at the US Institute of Peace, who had had a distinguished career in the US Foreign service, rising to #2 in Italy, and being the person who did the most to organize the Dayton Peace Accords. He received the award. This year we have nominated another classmate, Doug Meiklejohn, who has had a distinguished career using his law degree on behalf on environmental issues, often on behalf of otherwise marginalized native american groups in New Mexico. I wrote a letter of recommendation for him, and in the process have exchanged a number of emails with him.
I would not expect to receive an award from Haverford. That is not why I mentioned the two classmates. I did not seek out nor expect to receive the awards I have gotten for my teaching over the past 17 years. Nor do I in any way demean the value of what I have done since becoming a teacher.
Why mention it? Haverford was, at the times (all 3) I attended, a place that very much emphasized being of service. Many of those with whom I attended have chosen paths where they were more focused on how to serve others than in enriching themselves. We have some who became very wealthy, and I am not envious, critical nor jealous of their success. But I think my own natural inclinations towards service were deepened by being in a setting where service was so greatly valued and emphasized.
I perhaps have, in looking back, one regret. When I returned to Haverford the 2nd time of my 3 sojourns, after getting out of the Marines, I encountered a Peace Corps Recruiter. I applied for the Peace Corps, and had all but forgotten about it. I dropped back out after less than a semester, had begun working, then moved to New York, got a job, signed a lease on an apartment. One day my mail included notice that I had been selected to be trained to go to the Philippines. I was conflicted. A part of me very much wanted to do it, but I had also just begun a different way of living, had made commitments that I would have to abandon within a few months. I regretfully turned it down.
In all honesty, I was probably not emotionally mature or secure enough to have handled it. In less than two years I would have a serious emotional breakdown. And yet, a part of me has been tinged by regret for having passed on that opportunity. It would have enabled me to truly get to know a different culture.
As I look back over my life I can find many cases where i could have made different choices. - about work, about relationships, about many things. No doubt my life would thereby have been different.
But I am not prepared to argue that it would have been richer or more valuable to others.
Even the false paths on which I have traveled are part the self I bring to the tasks of teaching and of writing (itself a form of teaching).
I need only think of this - had I gone off to the Peace Corps, would I have returned to Haverford in 1971 at the age of 25? If not, would I ever have met Leaves on the Current? I first saw her in a music class when she was staying overnight with a couple where he was a German professor and she was taking a music theory class for free as a spouse. My life would have been very different without Leaves. I cannot imagine that it would be anywhere near as rich and meaningful.
This kind of reflection is relevant to my teaching. Some of my students are surprised at the choices I have made. I remember back in the late 1990s, when as a still relatively new teacher my salary was less than 40,000, when people were contacting me to work on conversions to avoid problems with Y2K with computers - most of my previous work experience had been in commercial and governmental data processing. I was offered a lot of money, including in several cases six figures. My students wanted to know why I didn't take it. In part my answer was that I thought i was doing a greater service working with them. Did the choice I was making, and which I shared with my students, help them understand that there are values more important than money? I hope so.
Other times, students are amazed at some of the people i know. By now they are used to seeing well-known journalists and politicians, even Congressmen from other states, show up in my classes. My acquaintances include people well-known in entertainment, business, various high levels of government, arts. . . One student once asked if I saw myself like Woodie Allen's Zelig. I remarked that by the time she reached my age, then just short of 60, if she went from our nationally known high school with its many distinguished alums (including people successful in NBA and NFL, going to the Olympics, successful in entertainment (Martin Lawrence, Kenny Latimore, the guys from South Park), or business (Sergei Brin of Googel) to a distinguished college or university, she too would know many people who went on to great success. It might even be that she would be the one classmates would say, oh, yeah, I went to high school with her.
I sit in a house that is comfortable albeit messy and somewhat disorganized. Some of the furniture is worn, some showing the evidence of the five rescued felines who allow us to share their lives. I can go from room to room and see its riches, the riches of our lives. In this room are tons of books, including all mine on music, several hundred LP records (and there are several thousand in my study), and around 700 CDs. My study and that of my wife are both overflowing with books, covering our various interests - remember, between us we have 6 degrees and I have most of a 7th. Even the two bedrooms have multiple bookshelves. Downstairs the finished portion of the basement has perhaps another 2,000 books.
These are our riches. Or some of them. We have photographs and letters.
We also have the riches of our families, especially nieces and nephews, and in my case now two great-nieces from my sister's son.
We might not have traveled to all the places we had hoped to see. Heck, we do not see half the movies we might enjoy. Time spent with a troubled nephew seems a far more valuable use of time, even if it involves a 6-hour roundtrip drive. So does volunteering at free dental clinics in Appalachia, even if that may be more like a 13 hour round trip drive.
I want to be able to listen to more music. I want time to again sit down at a keyboard and reconnect - with my dear friends Johann Sebastian, Franz Joseph, Franz, Ludwig, Wolfgang Amadeus, Robert, Frederick, and so many more. I want to make more friends through the actions of my fingers on ivory and the sound that then reach my ears.
There are old friends I want again to reread, new friends to be made as I turn the pages of the books they have produced.
It would be nice to get up on a Saturday without having to worry about the 120+ essays from yesterday's test that I must read and grade in order to place the results into a computer file.
I think I am getting ready to move on to the next phase of my life, whatever it may be. If I do not leave the classroom in June, I find it hard to believe that I will remain until I am 70, as I once thought I might do.
If I leave, which seems increasingly likely, it will be a choice that will be tinged with regret - I will miss being around the young people who enrich my days. It will be knowing that I can still be an effective teacher.
it will also be because it is time for me to take a somewhat different path, one not yet clear to me. Perhaps it will be determined by my getting the opportunity for either the doctorate or the fellowship or both. Perhaps I will be offered both yet accept neither, and still not remain in the classroom.
I do not yet know what the future may hold for me.
It has possibilities to explore.
Knowing that, it is something I can also give to my students, as I can from the choices of my past. Parker Palmer once wrote that he had turned to a wise Quaker woman for some guidance about a decision with which he was wrestling. Among Friends, there is an expression we have, about Way Opening, of being able to see how to travel in a certain direction. She told Parker that she had never experienced Way Opening. He wrote that he felt his heart drop, if this wise woman had never experienced it, what hope was there for him. But then she told him she had experienced Way Closing, which could serve the same purpose. He understood and I understand. When a path we thought we should follow becomes closed to us, only then do we turn our vision in other directions, and perhaps for the first time see other opportunities we had not considered. Way Closing is not necessarily a loss, but may be a gift that enriches us in ways we never could have experienced.
Way did not Close for me when i had to choose whether to go into the Peace Corps. I have at times wondered, in part because my niece did Peace Corps in Africa. At other times I did experience Way Closing - for one doctoral program that rejected me, for example.
I may be in my final semester of teaching. I may not. I must keep both thoughts in at least my subconscious mind. It is like the idea that this might be the final day of my life. I should not obsess about it, neither should I take it for granted.
How can I go through a day without remembering how lucky I am, how blessed.
How can I not thank Leaves for her love, her willingness to share her life with this difficult person?
How can i not enjoy the blessings of the students who enter my life, even as at times I may want to move on to other things?
I am teacher. I may not after this year be in a public school classroom, but that will not make me any less of a teacher.
I am more lucky, more blessed than I ever could have imagined.
Peace.