Why do we teach?

I got to loll in the Delaware Bay today. The water and the air were both about 80°F, the breeze about 15 mph, with clouds and sunshine taking turns playing on the beach. I got to see the sun while under the bay, something I love.

Delaware Bay, Jersey side

I know I am mortal. (Well, maybe not deep in my soul, but deep enough to profess on a blog.) I cannot swim as far as I once could, and, the surprising part (to me, anyway) is not needing to swim farther today than I did yesterday.

Death does not come to most of us in a day. Blame Lughnasadh.

I teach, and as each year approaches, I question why I teach. I think everybody who teaches owes it to their students to address this question.

If you cannot answer this, not saying you should quit. We all need to eat. But I think you owe it to your kids to tell them that you are not sure why you teach.

I will tell my kids why I teach. I do every year. It's between me, my kids and their families, and my administration (who have backed me for years, a huge part of why I continue to love what I do).

To teach to change the world is too damn abstract--spitting into the wind changes the world, changing the world is easy. Manipulating the world is a whole 'nother topic.

But I still love what I do, so I'll keep doing it.

And, BONUS!!!!, I'll keep lolling in the bay in late summer.....

Lammas, again

Yep, mostly the same post eighth time around--I like the rhythm of the year.
Nearing end of my 6th decade--more a spiral than a cycle, but it's OK.

"No ideas but in things."

William Carlos Williams

The English had a sensible name for this time of year before William the Conqueror blew through--weed month (weodmonað). We teeter towards the dark months. Things fall apart.

The sunlight diminishes perceptibly now. The plants know.

The past week we've eaten deep purple eggplants and bright pink brandywine tomatoes, yellow summer squash and green-and-red striped beans. Today we will pick basil for pesto, some for tonight, some for February. A bowl full of ripe blueberries waits for us, sunlight incarnate.

But the sunlight is dying, and the plants know.

We do not speak of religion in class, at least not formally. Students occasionally ask religious questions, and I deflect them. I explain that some things cannot be known through science, and that what I believe beyond the limits of science falls outside the province of class.

In class we talk of light and hormones, photoperiods and abscisic acids, to explain how plants know. We talk under the hum of fluorescent lights, time marked by defined blocks of time. In class, September light is exactly the same as February light, and class is always 48 minutes long, no matter where the sun sits.

This week marks the start of Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day--joy for the harvests that are coming and regret for waning sunlight. Lammas used to be celebrated--the first wheat berries of the year were ground into flour and baked into bread offered in thanks, some used for Communion, some for the feast that followed.

We thank God (or Tailtiu or Lugh or some other forgotten gods)--harvest time reflects death and grace, whatever the culture. Death and grace feel foreign in the classroom, indeed foreign in our culture. We pretend, at our peril, that life is linear.

Lammas falls halfway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. The days are shortening, winter is coming. Until you feel the seasons in your bones, until you follow a grain of wheat from the ground to plant to bread to you then back to the ground again, the modern myths may be enough.

Science can explain why plants produce fruit when they do, and I can teach the steps. We can test whether a student learns what I present, and the students that do this best have access to all our culture offers.

You can become very powerful, very rich, without knowing grace. 

You can go far in life if blessed with intelligence and beauty, degrees and citations, without ever knowing what a wheat berry looks like, without ever kneading a lump of flour and water and yeast into glistening dough.

In the end, we don't know much, and may never know much. We can, however, recognize grace. We might not grasp it rationally, but we we can grasp it--a good reason to celebrate Lammas.

The Skeleton of Death dances every hour in Prague--photo of the Prague Astronomical Clock by Sandy Smith found on VirtualTourist.
The modern myths are not enough.

Bonjour!

A "Bonjour" is all it takes....

We arrived at Aéroport de Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle early in the morning. We were tired, but so was everybody else, and, hey, nous sommes en France!

I studied enough French to get by, but in Paris I used little French--a few syllables into butchering their native tongue, and even the most insouciant Parisien perked right up and helped us out--France was on its way to the World Cup, and just about everyone was friendly.

Honfleur, by Leslie

The first moments in France, however, we saw an American ask a tourist information guide in loud English" "DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?"

The young man, Nicholas, admitted he spoke a tiny bit, and a very long conversation followed without a whole lot of information shared.

I was next.

"Bonjour!" (I knew enough to start with that.) Before I got halfway through the next sentence, Nicholas spoke to me kindly, and more important, fluently. In English.

My butchered French proved useful in the countryside, but in Paris, just about everyone quickly turned to English once I uttered "Bonjour."

Do your students hear the equivalent of "Bonjour!" when they walk in your classroom door?

Free range enfants....

I went to France, and I came back, and I am different. Why else travel?

Judging a country, or even a city, with just a few days under one's belt, is, of course, unreasonable. But this is a blog, nothing more, and my diary, nothing less, so I'm tossing ideas out here.

By Moonik

We we're wandering along the Seine, on a cobble-stoned walk along the Seine somewhere near the Pont Marie, enjoying the day. We had just had extraordinary ice cream (or something close to what we call ice cream here) at the Berthillon Glacier, and we we're walking, as we do, without a plan. (Walking around Paris, or pretty much anywhere, reveals as much as any mammal meant to walk can properly take in.)

We are older, so we do not move as quickly as the folks around us, and that is OK. A young couple strolled by with a child no more than four. She asked something in French, which I missed, and her parents answered, again in French (this is Paris, non?), and again I missed it.

This particular walk along the Seine has no walls between the walkway and the river. The river is a bit more staid than many in major cities, but it is still a river.

The little girl took off, running down the path, along the edge of the Seine, as her parents continued chatting with each other, obviously fond of each other.

The child put about 50 yards between herself and her parents, then scrambled up the steps to the Pont Louis-Philippe.

No reaction from the parents.

Until she hid. We could see her, her parents could not--Dad bolted, sprinting the 50 yards, dashing up the steps three at a time.

He found her, and he picked her up, and that was that.

And that's the point of the story. Children in Paris, at least this child (and we saw other examples), are given free rein.

Do some die from this "negligence"? Peut-être. Here in the States we focus on the safety.

What kind of child does this kind of parenting produce? If our anecdotal experiences mean anything (we saw a lot of kids), we learned this much--the children in France are self-assured and reasonably happy. They also seem to like adults, not surprising because the adults (not just the parents) seemed to like them.

This one was for me--but I'd love to hear your opinions anyway....

Being, not being, and beans

So I got a thing going on, not so unusual at my age, and given the chaotic nature of American medicine (and given my reticence and Oirish ability to ignore anything less than my heart ripped from my chest and beating in someone else's hand), I won't know much for at least a week, and possibly even longer.

The love of my life and I have planned a trip to France, and we're going, and that's that.

Still, I'm a tad unsettled, though the last couple of things turned out (mostly) OK. As one ages, the tide turns, or whatever fuckmook metaphor you choose to use. (I stole "fuckmook" from David Simon.)

So here I am , a beautiful June afternoon, hacking anything I can with an electric trimmer, a push mower, and hedge clippers (fuck near destroyed the grape vines when my sister was killed--turns out you *cannot* kill grape vines) and I stumbled across the beans and they gave me this:

Mortality is a blessing, until it's in your face, and then it's a fookin', well, not sure what to call it--still a blessing, I suppose. But the fookin' beans keep making more fookin' beans, and I'll keep eating the fookin' beans while I can, and, in a deep sense, that is enough.

Even when I do not believe it's enough, it's enough....

Fixing a porch light

S.S. Atlantus, decaying in the Delaware Bay

The porch light sways oddly in a breeze, hanging by two wires

One of its panes is broken, and has been for years. We did not notice until a sparrow took shelter inside the lamp one cold winter evening, the curly fluorescent bulb warm, not hot. The sparrow returned on the coldest nights for three winters, then we never saw it again.

I had not noticed the lamp housing had come loose until the flickering started, the usual rhythmic ebb and flow of electrons breaking into syncopated staccato, an unnatural light, created by humans, repaired by humans.

I am now at an age where things fall apart faster than I can put them together again, an age when I lose words faster than I find new ones.

I will fix the porch light this week. Leslie will remind me, kindly, that we can pay someone to do it, and I will remind her, less kindly, that I can do it. Rage, rage against the dying of the porch light....

I see things I did not see before. Under this porch there is land that has been here a long, long time, with people on it, a long, long time, and it will remain here a long, long time. I used to see it when I was a child, imagining what people, what critters, walked where I walk now.

I stopped along the way. Chances are you did, too.

We are surrounded by the cycling dance of detritus and the living, disorder to order then to disorder again, the the sun casting the same clay into quahogs, grackles, dogfish, and humans.

I will fix the light soon, but first I must see the edge of the sea again.

We live, we glow, we flicker, and then back to clay to be resurrected again. 

A June prayer

It's June again, always good news.

I am sitting in the sun, the dying flowers of a paper birch tree raining down on me (there are seven on my keyboard at the moment).

We see what we see when we see it, and no one else does. No one. The rush of the wind, the aromas of slight decay in the jubilance of June, the warmth of a sun that remembered to come back.

A tiny green aphid is casting a shadow on the back of my hand, impossibly busy.

Our brains do what they can, dependent on the senses we've evolved to get to this point, here, now, and in June, our guard is down. Light and food  abound. June is good for mammals.

Because we are each living in a singular universe, we are easily fooled. June is a time to get grounded again, sit outside, watch critters who care nothing for you, gaze at the shifting shadows, feel the mortality sitting in the shadows,

This whole thing is ridiculous, of course, and words only make it more so.

We are in trouble, again. We like to listen to the noise of our own making. We cling to hate, to fear, to the abstract.

But outside the world continues to be the world, a handful of good dirt still draws me in, and the beans and the peas and the basil continue to give and give and give.

Someday I am going to miss this (or maybe that's just conceit--I cannot miss what I will not know), but I trust a few of us will remember to go outside, grab some dirt, and remind the rest of us what matters.

June....