If there is one thing that’s fabulous about keeping a blog (or journal, or planner, or whatever you like that helps you record your days), it’s being able to go back to previous Septembers and read what was going on, nod your head and say, “OK, you were in a funk then. OK, you don’t handle transitions well. OK, you feel like a failure and a fraud, blah, blah, blah. But look! You wrote it down. You kept working even if you felt miserable about all of it. So, do it again.”
I’m walking through these days right now with more to do than I can shake a stick at. I have to give something up and I don’t know what it is. Or I’m afraid of what it is. Before I decide though, I’m feeling miserable and working because it’s how I work out my faith, I guess.
Last night was Back to School Night. It was Back to School Night at Hadley and Harper’s school, too. Plus, Hadley had soccer practice. So Jesse and I did what we do: we planned an easy meal for dinner, juggled where we’d be and when we’d be there, and I stood in front of parents whose children I teach while he listened to our kids teachers. I came home, poured myself a Super Big Gulp glass of wine and watched One Tree Hill. First though, here’s what I had to say to the parents:
I have an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University, and a BA in Education from Calvin College, a husband who is a hurricane storm surge modeler at NOAA, and two daughters named Hadley and Harper. For those of you who are familiar with To Kill a Mockingbird, I wanted to name Hadley “Radley” but my husband thought I was taking it too far.
Hadley and Harper and I are reading Harry Potter before bed, and the night before the first day of school we read about Harry learning how to create Expecto Patronus, the spell that brings along a guardian shield that holds all your good feelings so you can fight off what you’re afraid of. Harry wasn’t sure he could do it; he worried that the things he was afraid of were too strong for any good thoughts and memories he had. On the eve of our first day of school, after spending every minute together wandering through summer days, Hadley, Harper, and I empathized with Harry. Would we be able to handle what the school year brings? Would I be a good teacher this year? Would Hadley have a good year in 3rd grade? Would Harper enjoy 1rst grade?
I looked up synonyms for “expect” and “patron,” in my thesaurus after the girls went to bed: await, gather, hope, trust; friend, angel, guide. The words soothed me, and my prayer for this year, the one I have for my girls, your children, and myself is that angels gather around us as we attempt things we don’t know if we can do. That we await and hope, and trust for good things to rain on us during fearful and overwhelming times. And most of all, that we believe that because we are made in the image of God, we already carry that light with us; even when we can’t see or feel it. It’s there; and so is God.
Our new administrator asked us during a teacher in-service when it would be that our students would experience beauty in our classrooms. I use his question to guide my lessons. In 8th grade, we are studying William Goldman’s interruptions in The Princess Bride. We decided that he keeps breaking from the story to tell us about a memory because this story mattered to him. I asked the students to think of a story that mattered to them when they were younger; a picture book, a favorite Bible story, and write two interruptions into it. The students brought in titles such as The Giving Tree, If You Give a Mouse a Cupcake, Amelia Bedelia, and the story of Esther. The point is to write expressively, but also to share the beauty the experienced in the story with others.
In 7th, we are reading The Wednesday Wars, and we are studying this paragraph: “And do you think I complained about this? Do you think I complained about picking up old lunches that had fungus growing on them and sweeping asbestos tiles and straightening Thorndike dictionaries? No, I didn’t. Not once. Not even when I looked out the clean lower windows as the afternoon light of autumn changed to mellow and full yellows, and the air turned so sweet and cool that you wanted to drink it, and as people began to burn leaves on the sides of the streets and the lovely smoke came into the back of your nose and told you it was autumn, and what were you doing smelling chalk dust and old liverwurst sandwiches instead?” (Gary Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars, 24-25)
We talked about finding beauty in negative situations and then I asked the students to try what Gary Schmidt did. That is, surround a negative moment with beauty. One student is writing about smelling fresh cut grass while mowing a lawn he did not want to mow. “IT’S GINORMOUS! Nobody wants to cut a ginormous lawn on a summer day,” he told us. “But I like that fresh cut grass smell.” Another student is writing about having to clean out her dad’s car before going for ice-cream. “All the stuff in it was my brother’s, and do you think he helped us? NO!” As she cleaned, she saw a cardinal. “I never see cardinals. They’re my favorite bird.”
We are also creating a scrapbook of concepts we’re studying in Latin and where we find those concepts in English. The other day, we underlined all the prepositional phrases in Psalm 119 and this paragraph: “No, he can’t win. But sometimes I wonder if perhaps Shakespeare might have let something happen that would at least have allowed a happy ending even for a monster – some way for him to grow that would as least have allowed a happy ending even for a monster – some way for him to grow beyond what Prospero thought of him. There is a part of us that can be so awful. And Shakespeare shows it to us in Caliban. But there’s another part of us, too – a part that uses defeat to grow. I wish we could have seen that by the end of the play.” (The Wednesday Wars)
I asked the students to draw a monster that needs to be defeated and describe it using at least one prepositional phrase. Maybe we don’t think it’s beautiful to take a look at what is negative or monstrous about us, but when paired with Psalm 119, we see a God who surrounds us and knows us so well that perhaps He believes that monster just needs a little attention and love to become something different.
May we walk though this school year expecting angels to surround us as we do all the difficult and scary things we don’t think we can do. -Amen.
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