Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I have been running on the Farmington Canal trail through Hamden a lot recently. Isabel has gymnastics class several times a week and the trail is a short drive from her gym. This gives me two or three excellent opportunities in the midst of an often-busy workweek to get out and run four or five miles without feeling like I should be somewhere else, doing something else.

Since the New Year, I have seen the same hawk, perched in the same tree, each time I have run the trail. The time of day is always the same, the tree is always the same, and the bird is always the same. I am not really sure how I even saw it the first time. It sits so still and its mottled feathers match the bark of the trunk it tucks up against so perfectly that it is sometimes hard to spot, even though I now know exactly where to look.

I have gotten to the point that I now stop and say hi to the bird. (My daughter thinks this is slightly crazy.)

Each time I have run the trail these past three weeks, it has been cold and often it has been snowy. There have been very few other humans out there in that oddly beautiful little valley running through some fairly developed neighborhoods near some heavily trafficked roads. I have had a lot of time and space and quiet to let my mind wander the way it will during a good run.

Where my mind has wandered lately is to the idea of “change.” New Year’s resolutions are all about making changes. Barack Obama ran hard on the notion of making necessary changes. My wife and I have been contemplating what sorts of changes to make in our lives.

Yet, the status quo has such power and things can feel so frozen.

As I run through that valley and hear the stream gurgling through the snow-covered rocks, it feels like winter will not end. Actually, that doesn’t quite explain the feeling. Rather than winter not ever ending, it feels as if the changes the Earth and Sun need to go through to make winter turn to spring will never happen. It is not a feeling of hopelessness, but rather one of powerlessness. Spring absolutely WILL happen. There is just nothing I can do to make it happen any sooner. And as a result, winter feels like the permanent state of affairs.

A few days ago I thought about getting the hawk’s opinion on this idea but when I stopped to try, one look at him told me he would not understand. One look at him told me that he is patience personified, (or should I say “avified?) That hawk would not want to make spring come any sooner. That hawk is waiting. It is what he does. He waits. Spring comes.

Feeling Gravity's Pull

There is a great scene in the movie Apollo 13 where the astronauts and Houston realize that they can use the gravitational momentum provided by going around the moon to propel themselves back through the void of space and on toward Earth. Without the extra burst of momentum gained from a close pass of the moon it is unlikely the astronauts would have made it back to Earth.
While running this morning the image of that little module using the invisible but powerful force of gravity to its advantage struck me as a great and guiding image for this part of my life. While having dinner with new friends last night we each took a turn telling how we had chosen our career paths. One said he had no choice—music has been his calling since he was young and nothing else has ever felt right. The other spoke in different terms of the same idea—singing is a calling for her, a vocation about which she does not have much of a choice.
When it was my turn to spill, I told them that I had not felt anything as clear and defining as a calling. After college I had many jobs. In most of those jobs, I was teaching somebody about something. The “somebodies” and the “somethings” changed from job to job, but the fact that I was teaching remained constant. There were sixth graders in Massachusetts learning about the environment, high schoolers in Montana learning how to dig fence post holes and pack for a three-day hike in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, Yemenis learning English, ninth graders learning how to read Shakespeare, and pre-schoolers learning the alphabet and where not to wipe their boogers.
When I hit thirty and felt like I needed to choose a path of some sort, I naturally settled on teaching. It was a calling I came to in retrospect. As I took stock and looked at what I had done with myself after college, I saw a narrative thread that I hadn’t even realized was there. Noticing that thread and then following it through all my experiences suddenly turned a seemingly-directionless stretch of ten years into a cohesive series of jobs and opportunities leading inexorably toward getting certified to teach. Turned out I was on a path and didn’t even know it.
But the patterns that work in the past aren’t always the most helpful in the future. In the past, my decision-making process has been instinctive, emotional, and haphazard. And it has led me to some amazingly rich experiences. But at 42 years old, I feel like I have a choice to make. So far I have been cruising through life without a lot of agency in my own life. After college I leapt out into the world by joining the Peace Corps and going to Yemen. This set me in motion through a particular part of the solar system where I was pulled by the gravity of some pretty amazing people, places, and opportunities, subtly altering my course in response to their influences.




But now I feel like those astronauts on Apollo 13. I want to claim some measure of control over my direction of travel. I want and need to become more conscious about how I use the influence of the people and experiences in my life. I want to do the math and pick an angle of approach to the rest of my life and make some things happen rather than simply responding to what happens. It feels like a time for some changes and I want to have a say in what those changes are. I want to take the accumulated gravity of everything I have learned and use it to consciously aim myself at my future. Here’s hoping it is a wild ride.

Field Trips

I took my students to Boston last week for an overnight whirlwind of a field trip. We were in Beantown for less than twenty-seven hours. In that time, we walked some of the Freedom Trail, participated in a re-enactment of the meeting that led directly to the Boston Tea Party, had free reign at the Boston Museum of Science after-hours, toured Paul Revere’s house and neighborhood, and shopped and hung out in Quincy Market on two beautifully sunny 70-degree afternoons.
When I tell other adults who are not teachers about this trip they adopt a look of equal parts horror and pity. The part about sleeping on the floor of an exhibit room at the Museum of Science with 18 fifth- and sixth-grade students and no shower or electronics allowed often elicits actual gasps. I often play along with their idea of how burdensome the trip must be for me, but I do so with a secret in my heart.
The secret is that I actually LIKE the trip to Boston. In fact, I look forward to it. Truth be told, I look forward to ALL of the field trips I take with my kids. There is the obvious reason that I am the one who chooses the field trips and I am careful to select only trips that are interesting and exciting to me as well as to my students. But there is also the less obvious, (though more important), reason that field trips get us out of our classroom and into the wider world.
The students at my school have, in many cases, known each other for seven years—more than half their lives. As a result, they are close. As a group they have grown up together. In many ways they are like a family. By the time they get to me they have a fairly well-defined group personality, with each student having identified his or her niche. In fact, many of them have staked out their particular niche so thoroughly that they have laid down carpet, painted the walls, and moved in some pretty heavy furniture.
This can make for a huge level of ease with each other. My students feel very comfortable talking about some pretty tough issues together. They also develop a level of confidence about speaking in front of large groups that I rarely see in ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year olds. They know each other WELL and there can be a real comfort in that. But, as with any family, this level of comfort can sometimes translate into an unwillingness to allow each other to change. When my kids get to be sixth-graders, some fairly drastic changes start happening shockingly fast. It amazes me each year when I look at the class photo taken in September and then compare it to the graduation picture taken in May. The sixth-graders have become their own older brothers and sisters by the time they graduate in June. Along with the drastic physical changes, there can be some substantial changes in personality, interests, and self-identity.
But their peers don’t always acknowledge these changes. As a result, there can be some dramatic conflicts during the year as people “try on” new ways of being with people are used to the old ways.
The reason I enjoy our field trips so much is that being outside of the environment in which these students have grown up and forged their personalities allows for a reshuffling of the deck, as it were. Something as simple as a change of scenery allows for changes in the dynamics of the group. Different people emerge as leaders, new connections are made between students who have known each other for years, little-known facets of some students get to take center stage and then those students are recast in the eyes of everyone. Something as simple as a long bus ride can create a new bond where for years there was none.
I feel like a big part of my job is to help prepare my students for life beyond our safe little world. One of the ways I can do this is by making it safe for them to change—to experiment with who they are and what they believe. And, as is often the case with the lessons I apply to
my students, the same can be applied to me. This is one of the things about my job that makes it so fulfilling even after so many years in the game. By thinking about my kids and what they need, I often gain insight into what I may need, too. I have not stopped changing just because I have hit forty. And neither have the adults around me who are important in my life. My daughter has really just started on her many changes to come.
This 27-hour jaunt to Boston helped remind me of how important it is to give the people around me room to change and grow and to ask them to do the same for me.