True Story: I was out walking our dogs early this morning, and decided on a whim to follow the urging of our older dog--an elderly, mostly deaf german shepherd--and head downhill rather then uphill for my customary dog-walk around the golf course.
Part way round, this same elderly, sweet tempered dog urged me off to the right, on a road providing access to the golf course for a group of residential dwellings just south of the course. Quite uncharacteristically, I followed her lead.
Now you have to realize that my wife Ellen and I live in an age-restricted, golf-course centered condo-community of about 350 acres located about 20 miles south of downtown San Jose. We've lived here about eight years at this point, occupying a pleasant but small condo quite close to the entrance of this "gated'' community. We like the quietness of our surroundings, the well maintained and quite spacious grounds, the predictability of the place.
So it came as quite a surprise to me this morning when I followed my older dog's lead, heading southwards from our usual round-the-golf-course route. I'm a person of fairly fixed habits in such matters, and truth to tell I was mostly thinking about this blog entry--what to use as its title and what to include as examples. I was in that semi-distracted early morning state of mind that I am often in at this hour, that is, while performing this particular dog-walking task.
And it therefore came as something of a shock when I looked up, as it were, from my distracted state of mind and realized I was walking on a path I'd never walked on before. A stream was flowing to my left, the grass was sloping gently towards me on my right, the morning birds were chirping in the trees above me, and the sun was just beginning to brighten the landscape. It was exactly as if I'd borrowed Philip Pullman's "subtle knife" and cut my way through into a parallel universe (see book review).
Now of course what made this discovery especially dramatic, in addition to illustrating just how thoroughly distracted I can become, was that this lovely path along the stream had been there all along, just minutes from where I'd been living for the past eight years. It was not a parallel universe, but rather a very distinct and tangible part of the very universe I inhabited. I just had not paid enough attention to notice this 'part' of my reality before taking my walk this morning with my dogs. It had taken my elderly german shepherd to gently steer me in the direction of a reality I simply had not known existed: a reality right in front of me, wholly coeval with the predictable, 'ordinary' landscape I thought I knew.
Might this same 'alternative path' be there, in a similar way, in the school settings most of us will be returning to this fall? We'll be expecting to take our regular and predictable "morning walks," of course, politely paying our respects to the loquacious social studies teacher, nodding perfunctorily at the permanently pinched mouth of the next-door math teacher, avoiding the principal's office for fear of being asked to take on yet another we-can't-function-without-it responsibility. But what if, rather than gritting our teeth and setting our minds to simply 'surviving' another year, we take a leaf from Pam Cheng's book (see comment by 'spam') and remind ourselves that "it's often our [fellow teachers] that give us the confidence to believe in [our own] worth. This is the 'sun' [we can] take back to our classrooms and schools to share with our students and colleagues. Perhaps if we can reflect the best in those around us, they will be inspired to find it in themselves."
And might blogsites such as this one become wonderful vehicles for enhancing such acts of appreciation among our 'ever-so-predictable' fellow teachers? What if we all committed ourselves to making one act of public recognition per day, via a blogsite for all to see, of the contribution that another teacher had made to our understanding of ourselves, our students, or our teaching. What if we simply set that as our collective task, our collective responsibility, our collective commitment as a whole school faculty? Might we begin to see that that lovely stream-side path, with overhanging boughs, twittering birds and brightly lit sloping lawn, had been there all along, just waiting for us to open our eyes and realize that it was part of our seemingly 'predictable,' seemingly 'ordinary' workaday world?
9 comments:
Good guess, Nicola. That's close to the mark. I have to take Ellen to the airport right now so won't be able to continue this blog until later today. But here's a hint: Think Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife.
I welcome Jonathan's invitation to make public our appreciation of each other. His blog about this is surely an occasion to acknowlege gratefully his blurring of the boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar, ordinary and extraordinary, private and public.
At some point Maxine Greene writes about making friends with another person's mind. She describes, as Robert Coles does in The Call of Stories, how literature (and art in general) offer us the opportunity to nurture imagination that enables empathy. I suspect that in the presence of beauty, as Jonathan must have been on his walk, we de-center, think of others with gratitude, often speaking to them as we walk our dogs. When I encounter a deer on campus, and a stranger walks up to me transfixed by the animal's beauty, I welcome the company. In fact, that capacious feeling has directed my attention to justice, as Elaine Scarry proposes in On Beauty and Being Just. The impulse to share beauty, perhaps, is also an impulse to distribute it fairly.
I am reminded of how a close friend and colleague and I travelled all the way to a conference in Goteborg, Sweden to talk about how friendship shaped our teaching for over two decades. At first the audience was surprised by our subject, and then opened up and explored with us what friendship means in our teaching lives. Jonathan urges us to be generous, as friends are with each other.
When I teach undergraduates in the same classroom in which our ISI meets, the room is haunted by teachers' voices. It is a parallel soundtrack to the one we create as we develop enough interest in each other to be useful as we consider the possibilities of writing a different world.
Responding to Jonathan's invitation here in this blog is about friendship made public.
The Pullman reference resonates with me. I felt that way when I drove up Hicks Road and discovered Sierra Azul only a few years ago, after having lived close by for the preceding 4 years. This network of trails opened up to me and, of course, it had been waiting patiently the whole time. I just hadn't noticed it.
"What if we all committed ourselves to making one act of public recognition per day, via a blogsite for all to see, of the contribution that another teacher had made to our understanding of ourselves, our students, or our teaching" (source).
What if we acknowledged the contributions our students make to our various understandings? How might that change the way we see our classrooms?
It's dreadfully important to catalog the inspiration we receive from peers. That's a very worthy goal, one I try to make a point of working toward in my own blog. I've had the thought before and I've proclaimed, loud and to the heavens, that many of the ideas I have are because of things I get from other teachers. I would not be even the smallest fraction of the teacher I am today if I had done this all in isolation. Honestly.
But I can see the inspiration our students bring to our lives as a more immediate influence over how effective we can be in the classroom.
I was talking with a friend and retired teacher (she taught French for long enough) just this morning and she brought up the idea that teaching the same literature for 15 years must be boring. I told her it most certainly is not. The observations students bring to the discussion every year, whether it's a new insight or just an intriguing line of logic leading to a tired interpretation, make teaching Hamlet a joy for me every year.
I don't see that joy fading away too much over the next few decades. Sure, some friends and co-workers will make it interesting for me by telling me something new or giving me an idea, but that's just a very likely possibility. Students bringing new life to a text and to a teacher is a sure thing every year, even if some years it feels like only a single student actually cares or thinks.
The Golden Compass
As teachers we need to cultivate the confidence to follow a student's lead, particularly in classroom discussions. If we only have our eyes on the prize -that one "right" answer to a question we have posed (or the dog walk's beaten path) - we may miss a truly astounding turning the conversation is ready to take.
We need Pullman's golden compass, not only the one pointing due north.
Carol
You took the path less travelled, and it has made all the difference.
I can't help but read Jonathan's article through the lens of the sad news these days about escalating violence in the Middle East and growing concerns about the potential looming environmental disasters that global warming may bring. I connect these and other issues to the experience Jonathan discusses--of suddenly seeing new an old and familiar landscape. I believe that our attitude toward students and colleagues reflects the way we see the world as a whole. If we are present to the possibilities those people possess, we will see much beauty, we will hear those birds chirping! The willingness to see the world new every day may be our evolutionary imperative as a species. How's that for Big Picture? What if everyone approached his/her occupation every day with the question in mind--what would be best for assuring our future today?--our lives could make small differences that could add up to some important differences in the world. That's my sermon today.
Amy
I love your website. It has a lot of great pictures and is very informative.
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It's great to read about the power of positive feedback for teachers. I've heard somewhere that negative comments, which teachers receive constantly from the media and often from the community have twice the impact of positive comments, so a focus on providing positive honest feedback to each other is a welcome corrective. Great blog! Lots of good communication going on.
So it is finally time for me to enter the world of blogs. Thank you Jonathon, for the invite. On reading your piece, I was struck by the surprise as well as the delight of your unplanned diversion. I often find myself haunted by such places, perhaps even burdened by them. Pathways, streams, hillsides abound around me which I have yet to visit, and yet I find my self back on those trails that are by me well worn, and which I walk with great satisfaction, and on my best days, being surprised and delighted. Yes, on other days I walk them only out of habit, with my mind on other things and so I forget to see where I am.
We are selecting books for our reading group, our 22nd season, and the list of books still to read is long and wonderful, but I read Grossman’s wonderful new tranlation of Quixote and I think that we should read it again...there was so much that we did not stop and look at, so much we missed. So should we still rush to diminish the pile of the unread? I am ready to return to some familiar pages.
In our classrooms, with our colleagues, these are the familiar paths, the ones we think we know all too well, so they seldom surprise and delight. We anticipate what they will say and our answer is equally predictable. So I go back to the good days on my walks, when my eyes are open and I see small details I had not noticed, when I stop and listen, the days when I connect profoundly with where I am (and this is not an overstated use of the word profound). The surprise and delight is always there, but we are often doing other things which seem more important.
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