The Rich Present Things

Is this how God inspired lace?  I think so.

It's a beautiful morning, and now suddenly here is life in the month of May.  I've been a little muddled by the entrance of such a good month....it's been a busy week.  On Tuesday morning, I woke up halfway thinking it was Saturday. (It wasn't!)  All week the kids were off kilter.  Everyone was.  None of the days seemed right.  There was a lot of good in them, but it was all mixed up.   It's as if the rudder of a giant ship has changed course and the rest of the boat is slowly moving with the intended change.   We are almost done with school. 

I woke up this morning from the strangest dream.  For all of the intensity of my life's work this week, the dream I had was nothing well connected to it.  I dreamt I was in my own classroom and someone came in and told me that I had to have a student teacher in the last month of school.  He barreled into class.  And when he came in he was just like someone I worked with a long time ago who openly mocked my style of teaching in front of students.  (How annoying, unprofessional, and traumatizing.)  In my waking hours, I have faced the feeling and figured it out.  And I do not let that style of passive-aggressive insecurity become a part of my conversations, especially in front of students. 

I would just not allow it. 



In my dream it was even my classroom, and he came in and took everything off of my desk, made weird jokes, and tried to teach my lesson.  And the kids looked at me in shock.  And the whole time I was thinking, 'Oh no no, you are NOT doing THIS.'  And I had a plan for his removal in a dignified way, at least in front of students.  I even had choice words for him later.  Current strategies meeting an earlier time in my life? 

Five years ago I knew a season of weakness.  I taught a Government class in a block schedule.  Not my cup of tea.  And having pneumonia didn't help the stamina aspect required of teaching.  From this time I remember very little except the feeling of not measuring up at all in any moment that I was in that school.  I remember one kid's name when I usually remember every one's.  Nash.  (Who names their kid Nash?)

Stranger than the dream itself was the actual part of waking up.  It took me a long time, and when reality was finally clear, I took a few minutes to see how completely different my life is from a time when I used to have dreams of lessons gone wrong all of the time.  Now I don't CARE if lessons go wrong....it's part of the chaos of learning.  I have included myself in those ideas, which is a relieving and seamless way to see school and learning. I think it also helps you last.

NOW I tend to have dreams about actual historical events, like last week when I dreamt of war-torn Poland.  What the heck do I really know about living in war-torn Poland?  In my dream I certainly seemed to know where to go (and hide)....it wasn't great. 

In waking up, I realized that 5 years of teaching seemed to pass through my mind all at once.  I'm not the person I was 5 years ago.  People rarely are.  My ideas of teaching, how to treat students, how to navigate conflict, how to grade big projects, how to connect with coworkers, even how to study history....it's all different.  And what a relief.  At this point of reflection, I didn't feel like I could go conquer every ungraded paper sitting on my desk.  It was no rah-rah moment.  But I did feel that there was stable ground and rational thinking again.  Isn't much of dreaming about stress and control and possibility and risk anyway while the brain rests and resets? I tend to think so.

I talked about Renaissance literature and the Great Depression this week at school.  (Two different grades, courses, and books.)  And when I was talking about the Great Depression, I understood my family a little more.  I realized how much of this time in history I know about in a personal way.  My grandparents lived through it, and they took time to tell me about it.  I've heard the stories over and over again.  I thought everyone was hearing about the 30s like this.  But they weren't.  I come from a family of storytellers.  I saw that with clarity this week.  And that my audience this week was very much the 13 year old view of things...many of them have confirmed my suspicions over and over again that it is lame to talk to your parents.  In this moment I told them about this quote....

 When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.  - Mark Twain

....but most of them didn't think it was funny.  (Yet.)

I told them what I knew about how to survive blizzards and what it was like to farm and what you thought about when you were living that way.  And my dad's view of winter survival came in, and I told them about what it was like to have him teach me how to drive in the winter in light of this way of thinking. 

Beyond that, I told them a story about getting into an argument with him in high school about winter survival, and they laughed.  I think because they know about conflict with parents, and because you can tell in stories about my dad that he is a wonderful soul.  One kid raised his hand and said, 'I think I'd really like to meet your dad.'  He's the second one at school to tell me that this month.  It made me remember that my father is a dear and that I missed him even though he was an hour away.  

It's been said before by many.  He really is one in a million.
So much of this blog becomes a conversation about teaching. I assure you, and myself, that there is much more to my life. I relish the difference and the boundary and the removal from such an intense job. This week I think I have done ok in the separation from home and school. I saw my friends, I took time for conversations about life beyond a lesson plan, and I plan to this weekend. In the moments away from Room 232 this week, I have been astonished at the goodness and comfort of knowing wonderful people. My friends and family have verve for life and I love that about them. Connection with them gave buoyancy to the day when I felt exhausted, and I made sure to tell them so.

I have lately been thinking about how nice it is to feel comfortable in your own skin.  To be the very thing you were made to be.  In a world built on 'not enough' and 'close, but no cigar', I feel very much at peace with who I am, what I look like, where I am supposed to be, and what is present.  Who wants the cigar anyway?  I think this is the peace of God finding its way into every corner of my life.

And I must be clear.  I have been wrestling with God lately...intellectual questions meeting heart, and have felt like no saint in the process.  No actualized Christian.  Thankfully I don't think that exists without the movement of God's Spirit and it never seems to be a static and arrived place.  I've marveled at God's presence in history.  It's all over the book I look at when I teach.  I've seen it play across the features of people I know and what they tell me in their stories.  I see it in the St. Croix Valley.  The valley is actually such a LOVELY expression of the beauty of God.  (Come visit!)  Best of all, I've seen it in the present.  The present is an oddly forgotten part of my busy life as a history teacher.  I have to be careful, or I will always be looking back, and forgetting the thrill of what is current as well. 

And that's the very thing I mean.  The present is so rich.  I used to really like the quote by Emily Dickinson that said, 'That it will never come again is what makes it so sweet.'  But now I think it's kind of sad.  I've lived bittersweet, and it makes you sing songs like 'Silence' by Jars of Clay.  The comfort is in the perfect character of God and the honesty of the lyrics. Not the bittersweet Emily Dickinson poems.  I used to think it was noble and again, wistful, of her to store her poems in drawers, but now I don't.  I'm sure she wished she could have published them, but her social anxiety stopped her.  Or the fear that strikes all writers with dread before they even write a word.  And I sincerely wish that writers would get over that more often.  Myself included.

My affinity for helpful youtube clips continues.  See song below.

  

Avoiding the charm of that quote makes me think I'm more concrete about the world and not as wistful as a 20 year old version of myself.  (Maybe teaching Government now would not be so scary.) 

Anyway, the present is rich.  As I type, I am drinking good coffee out of a little white cup at the desk by my window.  There is a picture of my mom, sister, and I on the desk.  I miss them.  This week I miss my dad and brother too.  And there isn't much else on this desk because I always want my eyes to travel to the window.  Suddenly spring is here again, and best of all, there is a breezy breeze coming through the window.  And the sun has wonderfully met the hill on which I live.