MindSpinner

I am not one of those women who collect dolls, or tea sets, or whatever else it is that people collect. I don’t collect anything. I am not a fan of knick knacks. I see them as obstacles impeding speed dusting, as visual clutter. They do not make me say, “Aaaah, I’m home” when I walk into a room. Instead, I need simplicity to lower my blood pressure and dissipate stress - the kind of simplicity that you see in some magazines but almost never in real houses because real people have to have a place to put stuff that doesn’t necessarily look good in a photo shoot. Or they have kids besides.

It is therefore difficult to explain the toys. Every once in a while I buy a toy, the sort I would have picked up ten years ago in hopes of delighting my children. When I come home with one, these same children (or perhaps utterly different ones switched out when I wasn’t paying attention) now look at me as if I’m out of my mind.

There is the small bevy of circus push puppets (not a collection, mind you, a bevy) that I bought last year because they were bodaciously whimsical and colorful. They made me happy and reminded me of my father, who first showed me how a push puppet worked when I was a little girl. I haven’t the faintest idea where to put these.

When I push their buttons (which isn’t often - that’s good, right?), they wobble and sway, their joints all loose. If I push harder, they flop over completely. But just as soon as I release the pressure that loosened their strings, they pop back up again erect and alert. I think I could pull that off, too, that popping back into form, as a matter of fact, anytime life gets its big old thumb off my buttons long enough ;->.

My latest toy lapse, if that’s the term for it, came today at Kroger. Some sort of lapse was inevitable. If it hadn’t been a toy, it probably would have been a gratuitous magazine, something with pictures of people recreating outdoors amid fall scenes - bicycling or canoing or hiking or just having a picnic. I blame this on FEMA, mostly. We had emergency management training yesterday at school, courtesy of that governmental agency. That experience will be a post unto itself after grades are posted. Couple FEMA training with a four-hour grant meeting today, a homecoming parade, and grades being due, and you have a woman bent on decompression by the time she makes it to Kroger to buy the makings of a cookout because, by golly, if she cooks tonight, it will be out.

The Beanie Babies were over in section where stuff that doesn’t belong in a grocery store is sold. There were artificial tabletop Christmas trees and wire Santas sure to ruin Christmas even earlier than usual this year, videos for $9.98, and a small box of generic-looking Beanie Babies.

My kids and I loved Beanie Babies. We loved them before everybody else loved them and after everybody else forgot about them. We still have a bin full of them sealed up in the garage. Amid the ubiquitous horses and bears at Kroger, there was a mottled purple dragon with wings of cadmium yellow and splotches of ochre and brown.

I have a weakness for dragons, one which can be traced back in all directions to all sorts of sources - Beowulf (most delightful in Anglo-Saxon), Jack Prelutsky’s children’s poems in The Dragons Are Singing Tonight, Busch Gardens’ Land of the Dragons, a place my children loved when they were very small, and God knows what else. This fellow at Kroger was a little gargoylish, roundish dragon with a piercing avuncular gaze. It’s hard to look like an analyst and a little purple dragon at the same time, but if you can do it, you get to come home with me.

Perched on my dresser, the dragon seems serious and perhaps a little sad, and one ear is longer than the other, but I’ve righted its drooping wings so that it looks as if it could fly. It has already given the cat a fright.

When the latest issue of The Atlantic arrived a few weeks ago, it disappeared, as usual, into my son’s room. This morning I skimmed online the cover article, on Lincoln’s depression. There’s no time for commentary between this moment and five minutes from now, when I have to rouse sleeping teenagers, but I found Joshua Wolf Shank’s piece intriguing for its thesis:

… Lincoln’s melancholy is part of a whole life story; exploring it can help us see that life more clearly, and discern its lessons. In a sense, what needs “treatment” is our own narrow ideas—of depression as an exclusively medical ailment that must be, and will be, squashed; of therapy as a thing dispensed only by professionals and measured only by a reduction of pain; and finally, of mental trials as a flaw in character and a disqualification for leadership.

Throughout its three major stages—which I call fear, engagement, and transcendence—Lincoln’s melancholy upends such views. With Lincoln we have a man whose depression spurred him, painfully, to examine the core of his soul; whose hard work to stay alive helped him develop crucial skills and capacities, even as his depression lingered hauntingly; and whose inimitable character took great strength from the piercing insights of depression, the creative responses to it, and a spirit of humble determination forged over decades of deep suffering and earnest longing.

And for its conclusion:

Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is a story not of transformation but of integration. Lincoln didn’t do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy; the problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.

Hot from mowing until the rain began to fall, I lingered today in the garden, listening to the crescendo of pattering, cooled by the drops. I sat on the stone bench for a time, still, drinking in the scent of roses and thyme, rain and earth, and the sight of the little path the stones make where there was none before, wending around the strawberries and back to the corner where the grape vines have found their way over the arbor and then beyond into the grass where the shade garden is still only an idea sketched in seedlings.

The hummingbird was not there today, in the rain with the roses, but it was there yesterday, twice. I heard it then before I saw it, a vibration of wings, not three feet from my face as I bent to examine a flower. Yesterday, too, in the evening, the groundhog ambled out of the wild grasses and goldenrod that line the back of the yard along the old farm fence. Everyone I have told about the groundhog tells me how to be rid of it, but the groundhog and I have neighborly pact.

I stayed out in the rain until the urgency of trivial things pulled me indoors, but trivial things could not have me until I’d posted this acknowledgment.

This is going to be quick - and probably in need of revision. The end of the grading period approaches. But it’s been on my mind all week.

I don’t resent paying my taxes. I don’t think of taxes as an evil. When America is moving in a direction I can support, paying my taxes is a part of making the country what I want it to be, a place of justice and opportunity. It’s a part of doing my fair share on behalf of the future. I see my taxes as means to achieving constructive ends that I cannot achieve on my own. I don’t want to pay my taxes blindly, true, and I don’t want them wasted, but I am all for some of the things that a bit of money in the hands of a responsible government can do.

I have ambivalent feelings about the tax cuts I’ve received thanks to the “generosity” of the Bush administration. I don’t want to line my own pockets with an extra thousand or two dollars each year when that means that my children and grandchildren will have to shoulder an enormous national debt. I don’t want to keep the money in my pocket when levees and sea walls that protect cities are left inadequate for their purpose, when people in poverty have no means to escape a doomed city, when Americans can’t afford adequate healthcare, when environmental protections are compromised, when NPR’s funding is slashed - this list could go on and on, but you get the idea. I also recognize that a tax-cutting frenzy hasn’t actually left me any better off.

I’m tired of being called upon to value my own self-interest above the needs of the nation and my neighbor and to vote for those who pretend there is no necessity for sacrifice and no price to pay for greed.

Patriotism does not consist of waving a flag and following without question when we march off to war. Patriotism may more rightly consist of questioning incisively the motives, means, and ends of government, in affirming a nobler, more just vision for America, and in voting for candidates who are brave enough to say, “Yes, this is going to cost you something, but it’s going to be worth it, and the alternative is unacceptable.”

Once upon a time when I was very young, I taught English in high school because teaching kids was inspiring, because we plumbed literature and learning for big ideas and for ourselves and for what mattered.

Then it wasn’t inspiring anymore. There were two many preps and too many classes, each filled with too many students. The paper piles were enormous, and there was no life past them. Even these were not the essential issue, however. The issue was the black binder containing the curriculum I was mandated to teach. School wasn’t about big ideas and explorations anymore, and it wasn’t really about students; it was about what lay between the covers of that binder. And what was there lacked vision; it was amalgamation instead. I was an artist required to paint by number. I was a puppet on strings, the binder a ventriloquist and I its dummy. Students felt alienated, disconnected. Many students, especially my African American students, saw nothing of themselves in the curriculum (mostly dead white males) and decided there was nothing school offered that was worth having. Only half the kids who started high school would stay to graduate. The entire exercise was unconscionable.

At various times I’ve taken flight from teaching high school English. I spent a heady, happy time in grad school at Duke; I taught in a junior college; I took a year off as a mother of young children; I dabbled in freelance Web design and thought about a career switch. For a variety of reasons I landed right back teaching high school English in a public school, and, of course, though there’s not a black binder anymore, I have a curriculum to cover. The problem with a curriculum dissected into skills and content is that it feels dissected - as if a living breathing thing has been taken, etherized and anatomized - you’ve got all the parts there, but the spirit of the thing is gone. It doesn’t fly. It doesn’t dance. It doesn’t promise horizons and voyages of discovery. It doesn’t speak to kids of what they long to know and do, at least not to enough of them.

As it became clear that teaching would be my professional destiny, it also became imperative that I transform my job and my purpose. I would have breathe life back into the enterprise in order to stay alive myself and in order not to damage lives. That is what I have set out to do. We teachers, we custodians of content and replicators of skill sets, must redefine our task.

That begins with making meaning and illuminating connections between the work we do in school and the world beyond. I have to bring my discipline, alive and at work in the world, into my classroom. I have to show how it really is connected to everything else, how it matters, how it means, how it must be understood and mastered, how our collective future depends on our ability to read the world, forge understandings, and express ideas in ways that effect results. As we interact with ideas and expression, I can double check to be sure we are “covering” that mandated content.

But there is more. I’ve worked in schools where student and faculty morale have been low and people have felt disconnected from what they do. Not much of lasting value can be accomplished. In such settings, there is a lack, a need unmet and often unspoken. People need to feel valued for their unique selves, for their strengths and gifts, whether they are fifteen or fifty. They need to feel themselves affirmed, to feel themselves heard, and to enjoy the knowledge that they are making a vital and personal contribution. In my classroom, I need to look for students’ gifts and interests and strengths, and find ways to deploy and recognize these, to make a home for everyone where everyone matters. A smattering of conversations with teachers recently has made me realize that teachers need this no less than students do. A classroom should be - a school should be - a gathering of gifts. (I owe someone credit for that last line, someone Bill Moyers interviewed years ago for his series World of Ideas, but I can’t remember who it is.)

Bringing deep change to fruition, however, is difficult. It takes time to rethink, time to restructure, time to gather oneself and one’s thoughts before class. Only there really isn’t time in a high school setting during the flow of instructional days. There’s hardly time to think at all. Instead, school days amount to an endless flow of tasks and interactions, so real transformation takes place by fits and starts and sometimes gets lost in the hubbub. One of the substantial benefits of working at a semi-year-round school will be having the chance to reflect and regroup periodically. Our first break is only three weeks away :->.

Schools matter profoundly. Their mission is to actualize the potential of lives, individually and collectively - to inspire, to affirm, to enlighten, to equip. Hanging on to this bigger vision during an era of testing and accountability can be like hanging on to a tree to keep from being blown away during a storm. Holding on is hard, but lives depend on it. Research shows that schools can save lives - can afford at-risk kids the resources they need for resiliency and the wherewithal to triumph over adverse circumstances - if schools are places of caring and connection, affirmation and high expectations. Research also shows that when testing becomes the be-all and end-all of schooling, school tends to alienate students and no longer serves as a protective, nurturing place of becoming.

This is my seventeenth year in the classroom. I’ve held class in trailers and on college campuses, in affluent private schools and in high poverty public schools. It wasn’t exactly a long-term plan that I’d still be meeting classes every Monday, but I am, and now, after years, I know why I am doing it. I am doing it because what I have to teach brings me joy I can share with my students. I’m doing it because a school can save a life, and I’m doing it because the future depends on the skills and wisdom of the students I teach and others like them. (OK, I am also doing it because I have to pay the bills, but that fact does not energize me to meet the day or to meet my students at the door, so that’s not enough.) Truth to tell, the first life I’m in the process of saving, at least professionally speaking, is my own.