This past July I was fly fishing a particularly beautiful stretch of the Conejos River in South Central Colorado. Up above 10,000 feet elevation, the canyon water, mostly melted snow from the towering peaks all around me, rushed hard and fast downhill, crashing into one bend and then crossing over itself and slamming into the next like a stir-crazy kid stuck in his bedroom. Breaking the pace from time-to-time, it would slow down enough to speed-walk through a short meadow until it eventually lagged and loitered into what is Platoro Reservoir just a few hundred yards below where I was stationed. Up in the canyon all civilization ceases to exist. The smells and sounds of city life are replaced with the fragrance of fresh mountain rain and the whisper of innocence.
Just looking up at the remains of snow-capped peaks, you could just swear that you could touch the last spindly trees that made up the tree line if you reached far enough. Just out of reach, that romantic idealism makes you swear it would be but the work of a few minutes trek uphill to be the king of the world. As it is, at 10,000 you are at least a prince. That lack of oxygen that affects the trees also has a profound effect on the lungs of this man used to fishing muddy water 9,000 feet closer to the elevation of the ocean. So casting away my romantic feelings toward altitude sickness, I settled instead for a lesson in hard-nosed brown trout and what turned into a great lesson in life.
I was working a fascinating bend. The water, in its crash course, ran hard against a ledge rock that stretched straight up into the sky for forty feet, a beautiful ambush spot for any cougar with a taste for ignorant flatlanders. The water that rushed past the ledge couldn't have come up past my knees, yet it held a few selective brown trout that had, to that point, passed up my offerings. Despite swearing that I was matching the hatch of mayflies that presently buzzed the water (and many of which became trout food for the eager fish swirling around the run) my imitations possessed a quality that these educated fish deemed unacceptable.
Now it's during these moments where fish are eating, just not what you are feeding them, that a fly fisherman's mind goes to work. All thoughts of the job back home, bills, affairs of the heart, or anything else which causes tension in the shoulders seems to leak out of the fly fisherman's brain, out his ears, and disperses into thin air. To fill the empty vacuum, primal thoughts filter in. Mathematical equations subconsciously manipulate statistics present to the situation: air temperature, water temperature, sunlight or shade, dew point, air pressure and the like. These, the brain quickly cuts and pastes into a Pythagorean Theorm which will not tell of the length of the third side of a triangle, but more importantly, why in the heck a fish isn't biting down on your hook.
So as automatically as I am breathing right now, I casted, picked up my line, and re-casted, all the while, going over the inventory of my fly box in the hopes that I might have a more suitable offering, knowing that it wasn't in the stars for me to catch the monster brown who glided through the run, taunting me. It is also during these primal moments that the brain begins to wander from the water up the cliffs to the mountain tops like one singing and dancing through a musical with high-mountain meadows which are full of the sound of music. And it was in the motion of looking up that I noticed what was blatently staring me in the face: the aforementioned life-long lesson.
Not five feet above the water, nestled in a crack in the rock monolith, sat a nest of twigs, dried grass, and three chirping baby birds whose music could wake the dead. For all my concentration I hadn't noticed them in the twenty minutes I had been pounding the water, but there they were, sticking their heads out of the crack and incessantly crying like a group of boys on a playground when a bully takes away their ball. Now at first I thought that I was the cause of such commotion and as a fisherman first, I considered that they might have been doing this for quite some time, alerting the fish to an intruder much the way the cawing of a damned old crow interlopes between a stalking hunter and his massive whitetail. But in the matter of a second between nano thoughts, my theory was blown up and the resolution of my lack of fly-fishing prowess returned; they couldn't care about me because they had seen their mother come flying in with lunch.
I call it lunch, but it was more of a tiny snack than anything. She opened her mouth and the three little mouths were silenced for the better part of a thought before she flew away again. It struck me as an opportune time to sit down and eat my own little snack, a package of cheese crackers. Back on solid ground at the edge of the water, I watched the nest with particular interest. The three chicks kept their heads poked out of the crack in anticipation, and after no more than two crackers of my own, she returned to the cheers of her little ones.
I tried to refocus on the task at hand, possibly waiting for the dirtied water to "re-virginize" in my absence, but no matter how long I looked up into the sky at the fluttering of mayflies and back down into my box for their proper imitation, my attention was always returned to the crack in the wall and the joyous cheers of three little ones as the mother returned every two minutes with more food. This went on for thirty minutes, the mother never tiring, never sitting down, never ceasing. When I did pick up my tired old bones, I walked upstream to a new hole, a new hope, and a new beginning, but my primal thoughts didn't return the science and math of tricking a wise old brown trout. All I could think of was the connection between this tireless mother and to my own life, and to the lives of children and parents everywhere.
What if human parenthood were spent in the same ratio of service to our children as opposed to the service of our own selfish pursuits as this mother bird's had?
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
The September Blues
To be honest, I had plans on going to bed early tonight. Stress at work is taking its toll on me. When I first started teaching, I told myself that I could reach every student, make every student find a love of our language. Later when my professional priorities became more clear, I changed my thinking. I wasn't trying to make every student love the language, but make every student find success. What was that success? Well, my professional development has brought to my attention many glaring statistics, and has caused a load of stress.
*In 2006 30% of all jobs required a college education.
*It is estimated that in 2020, 90% of all jobs will require a college education.
George W. Bush, while in office, put even more pressure on educators. With the No Child Left Behind mandates, educators were now responsible for making sure ALL students graduated. Even though I have tried to tell myself in the years since I started teaching that reaching every student is an impossible attainment, it hasn't lessened my desire. That said, I have never had a year where all of my students have passed my class. In fact my classes have an average pass rate of 55%. Add to this the fact that I have basically dropped all my convictions about homework (I don't assign any anymore because that bottom 45% don't care enough to do it) and late work (I now allow my students to get their work in late, many times after having to chase down the student, put the assignment in his or her hand, sit the student down at a table I keep next to my desk, then stand over his or her shoulder until he or she does the work.) Add to this the fact that English 1, the class I teach, is usually an indicator as to whether or not a student will eventually graduate or drop out. I have to closely monitor a significant portion of my students because they don't value education enough to do this on their own.
I try to tell myself that I can't reach every student, but I just can't accept that. I tell myself that I have to care about them even if they don't care enough about themselves to try. And still I am a failure because my students fail. It doesn't matter how hard I try.
So every year I try a little bit harder, put a little more stress on myself to get through to the ones who need it the most, be a little more patient, pray a little more, nourish a little more, pull out all the stops, inspire, raise my voice, sigh, and weap.
And many days when the final bell rings, I ask myself what the hell it is that I am trying to do.
I had teachers that didn't care a lick if I passed or failed, and Mom and Dad weren't about to let me fail, so they sat me down at the dining room table and made me work through my algebra homework, made me study for the test in U.S. history. And I disliked them for making me do this, but deep down inside I knew that they were looking out for me. And when I would make a D or an F on a test, my teachers didn't have private chats with me. They didn't encourage me when I got down, didn't offer free tutoring if only I would come in early. Back then a student was in charge of his own studies. The teachers' jobs were to present information and grade the results. I even had teachers tell me I was stupid!
Well, when I departed college and landed in the real world, I swore I would take all those hard lessons I learned along the way and use them to help students pull themselves off the scrap heap. So a student isn't doing well in his studies: neither did I which means I can associate with him. So a student's home life isn't conducive to doing well in school: I could make up the difference and show them that an adult really cares about their welfare. I reasoned that if I made class fun enough while providing the proper classroom atmosphere, the students would respond in turn and learning would magically happen. When I was young all I had to worry about was my own grades. I had to make sure I passed all my classes, which was a stretch from time to time. Now I had the awesome responsibility of seeing to it that all 120 of my students were passing. And surprise, surprise, not all wanted to pass. In fact, about 45% of them would rather not pass for whatever reason. Still I expect 100% success or it's a failure.
Honestly, teaching in it's purest form is fun. It's a blast to present a short story that has an ironical twist and watch their faces light up. To know that the students will be on the edge of their seats until the last line because I don't make them read boring crap like my high school teachers made me. But instead, I have to stop in the middle of a sentence once a paragraph to stare at two students who are in a conversation because at fifteen, students believe that when I am talking, I am incapable of hearing them talk too. So then I show the students a way to do something much easier than how it was taught to me twenty years ago, and they complain that they have to do anything at all. Some will not even bring a pencil or paper to class, prompting me to play Santa Claus every day. And when I put the paper and pencil on their desks, some will passively aggressively refuse to do the work. Even if I tell them that it's a participation grade, the paper gets crumbled into a paper wad and thrown into the trash if I am lucky. And the worst part is that my students never really get to know me and have fun with me because they are not mature enough to reap the rewards of a fun education.
So to combat all this, to save the students from themselves, we incessantly go to meetings, creating individual plans of attack for each student, which if you count, 45% of 120 is 54 individual modifications I try to make and implement in the hopes that a student will be tricked into learning. And if all else fails, teachers in common have intervention sessions with the individual students. But every student is different, each has different home lives, with different issues and being a victim of the issue is more important than buckling up his boot straps and overcoming. Now of course I am looking at this from the perspective of a long-ago tenured 34 year-old teacher who is now out of touch with youth. Or so I've been told.
So my failure to attain perfection overshadows my successes because I don't take time to rejoice knowing there's always more work to be done.
Can you hear this Mr. Bush? Are you paying attention Mr. Obama?
So as of late, to cope or merely survive, I have had to look upon myself as a missionary. I pray for God's guidance and direction in my life, wondering if I am in the right place doing His work. Did I miss the boat? Is there something else I should be doing? Though I have a passion for helping others achieve their dreams and goals, I can't help but think that I once had some dreams and goals of my own. And as I talked with my wife tonight, old passions burned and a thought entered my mind: instead of trying to teach my students about other authors' works, they should be reading mine. But as for my personal failures as an unknown, unpublished novelist, must I just assume that God has me right where He needs me? I know that He will never give me more than I can handle, but sometimes, like right now, I have to wonder.
So, no. I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to slow down. I'm going to go back tomorrow and give it another try and expect perfection. And I will just have to trust.
*In 2006 30% of all jobs required a college education.
*It is estimated that in 2020, 90% of all jobs will require a college education.
George W. Bush, while in office, put even more pressure on educators. With the No Child Left Behind mandates, educators were now responsible for making sure ALL students graduated. Even though I have tried to tell myself in the years since I started teaching that reaching every student is an impossible attainment, it hasn't lessened my desire. That said, I have never had a year where all of my students have passed my class. In fact my classes have an average pass rate of 55%. Add to this the fact that I have basically dropped all my convictions about homework (I don't assign any anymore because that bottom 45% don't care enough to do it) and late work (I now allow my students to get their work in late, many times after having to chase down the student, put the assignment in his or her hand, sit the student down at a table I keep next to my desk, then stand over his or her shoulder until he or she does the work.) Add to this the fact that English 1, the class I teach, is usually an indicator as to whether or not a student will eventually graduate or drop out. I have to closely monitor a significant portion of my students because they don't value education enough to do this on their own.
I try to tell myself that I can't reach every student, but I just can't accept that. I tell myself that I have to care about them even if they don't care enough about themselves to try. And still I am a failure because my students fail. It doesn't matter how hard I try.
So every year I try a little bit harder, put a little more stress on myself to get through to the ones who need it the most, be a little more patient, pray a little more, nourish a little more, pull out all the stops, inspire, raise my voice, sigh, and weap.
And many days when the final bell rings, I ask myself what the hell it is that I am trying to do.
I had teachers that didn't care a lick if I passed or failed, and Mom and Dad weren't about to let me fail, so they sat me down at the dining room table and made me work through my algebra homework, made me study for the test in U.S. history. And I disliked them for making me do this, but deep down inside I knew that they were looking out for me. And when I would make a D or an F on a test, my teachers didn't have private chats with me. They didn't encourage me when I got down, didn't offer free tutoring if only I would come in early. Back then a student was in charge of his own studies. The teachers' jobs were to present information and grade the results. I even had teachers tell me I was stupid!
Well, when I departed college and landed in the real world, I swore I would take all those hard lessons I learned along the way and use them to help students pull themselves off the scrap heap. So a student isn't doing well in his studies: neither did I which means I can associate with him. So a student's home life isn't conducive to doing well in school: I could make up the difference and show them that an adult really cares about their welfare. I reasoned that if I made class fun enough while providing the proper classroom atmosphere, the students would respond in turn and learning would magically happen. When I was young all I had to worry about was my own grades. I had to make sure I passed all my classes, which was a stretch from time to time. Now I had the awesome responsibility of seeing to it that all 120 of my students were passing. And surprise, surprise, not all wanted to pass. In fact, about 45% of them would rather not pass for whatever reason. Still I expect 100% success or it's a failure.
Honestly, teaching in it's purest form is fun. It's a blast to present a short story that has an ironical twist and watch their faces light up. To know that the students will be on the edge of their seats until the last line because I don't make them read boring crap like my high school teachers made me. But instead, I have to stop in the middle of a sentence once a paragraph to stare at two students who are in a conversation because at fifteen, students believe that when I am talking, I am incapable of hearing them talk too. So then I show the students a way to do something much easier than how it was taught to me twenty years ago, and they complain that they have to do anything at all. Some will not even bring a pencil or paper to class, prompting me to play Santa Claus every day. And when I put the paper and pencil on their desks, some will passively aggressively refuse to do the work. Even if I tell them that it's a participation grade, the paper gets crumbled into a paper wad and thrown into the trash if I am lucky. And the worst part is that my students never really get to know me and have fun with me because they are not mature enough to reap the rewards of a fun education.
So to combat all this, to save the students from themselves, we incessantly go to meetings, creating individual plans of attack for each student, which if you count, 45% of 120 is 54 individual modifications I try to make and implement in the hopes that a student will be tricked into learning. And if all else fails, teachers in common have intervention sessions with the individual students. But every student is different, each has different home lives, with different issues and being a victim of the issue is more important than buckling up his boot straps and overcoming. Now of course I am looking at this from the perspective of a long-ago tenured 34 year-old teacher who is now out of touch with youth. Or so I've been told.
So my failure to attain perfection overshadows my successes because I don't take time to rejoice knowing there's always more work to be done.
Can you hear this Mr. Bush? Are you paying attention Mr. Obama?
So as of late, to cope or merely survive, I have had to look upon myself as a missionary. I pray for God's guidance and direction in my life, wondering if I am in the right place doing His work. Did I miss the boat? Is there something else I should be doing? Though I have a passion for helping others achieve their dreams and goals, I can't help but think that I once had some dreams and goals of my own. And as I talked with my wife tonight, old passions burned and a thought entered my mind: instead of trying to teach my students about other authors' works, they should be reading mine. But as for my personal failures as an unknown, unpublished novelist, must I just assume that God has me right where He needs me? I know that He will never give me more than I can handle, but sometimes, like right now, I have to wonder.
So, no. I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to slow down. I'm going to go back tomorrow and give it another try and expect perfection. And I will just have to trust.
Monday, September 7, 2009
The Revenge of the Nerds
The nerds got it. For those who read my last post, I have decided to go with LAMBDA, LAMBDA, LAMBDA for my fantasy football team name. I have always been an underdog in this league, making the playoffs only once in the last five years, so the underdog name fits well. Three days till the pro football season starts. At times I thought it would never get here. Same goes for college and friday night lights. There's nothing more depressing about going to school in August than to have to survive four weeks of school until football starts.
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