On Teaching as Letting Go

            In October of 2009 a group of Tibetan Monks came to MU to create a Mandala out of sand.  This involved spending 24 painstaking hours creating a beautiful work of art only to blow each carefully crafted image into the atmosphere never to be seen again.  I remember being fascinated by the practice.  “There is a lesson here for you,” I kept telling myself.  “Pay attention.”

            The symbolic act doesn’t require a whole lot of interpretation.  Nothing is permanent.  Don’t get too attached.  There is beauty in the now.  There is beauty in letting go.  The power is in the doing and not the finishing.  Change is inevitable. 

            I thought of my own weaknesses a lot during the three days these monks inhabited our campus.  I tried to tell myself that I could write even if no one read it.  I reminded myself not to hoard.  I questioned my own resistance to change, my instinct to dwell, my inability to let go.  I kept wondering the lesson, but really the lesson was there in front of my face.  I just wasn’t letting it into my heart. 

            This week has been hard.  In addition to the grief over losing a dear friend and colleague, I find myself pondering the inevitable shifting of relationships in all areas of my life.  I think of other coworkers who I have grown apart from, not by choice but by circumstance.  You go from literally knowing what they eat five days a week, what they wore each day, who is driving them crazy (both at school and at home), who is burrowing into their heart (again in both places) to catching up quickly while passing at the copy machine after a content or grade change -  or worse - as you bump into each other at a district meeting after a building shift.  Coworkers share an intimacy that is deeper and yet often more impermanent than many relationships that don’t even begin to scrape the surface the way the safe anonymity and shared existence of doing the daily grind in tandem allows. 

            More importantly, I find myself thinking of the students who come and go and the discomfort I feel with my comfort with these goodbyes.  There are few spaces like that of a classroom.  The people that inhabit it build and love and collide and negotiate in similar ways to families.  There becomes a shared history, a need to coexist.  As I read the plethora of stories both funny and poignant from my colleague’s former students, I find myself less emboldened by our impact and more saddened by the inevitable goodbyes necessary in the teaching world made apparent in these stories.  

            I feel this weighing on my heart especially this year as I get down to the final stretch with a group of children who have truly burrowed their way into my heart.  I am not sure what it is about this year.  I came very close to making the permanent switch out of the middle school classroom last year and into a college level position.  The affection I feel for these kids might be my heart’s way of making sure my brain doesn’t get disillusioned by my degree again. These children have been a gift, but the impending goodbye confuses me.  I usually understand the necessity of these temporary bonds, but today I find them troubling.  I find myself forgetting how this cycle I’ve experienced 18 years (another eleven when you count my college students) works.   I keep thinking back to my very first group of 6^th graders who I was lucky enough to teach as 6^th and 8^th graders.  A very small few occasionally touch base, but for the most part they belong to other teachers now.  It’s how it should be.  I accept it.  I miss them. 

            Teaching is blatant metaphor for those monks and that sand art.  We work so carefully for one, maybe two years with these little grains of sand.  We shape them.  We shift them.  We get to know them in such genuine ways.  We care about them deeply.  Then May comes and we must destroy the mandala.  I am not sure I get the lesson in all of this other than to say there is no other way.  The only way to play a part in over 2,500 students lives as my friend did is to create and move on, create and move on, over and over again, year after year. 

There is beauty in the now.  There is beauty in letting go. The power is in the doing and not the finishing.  Change is inevitable. 

On my absence from blogging and my love for 6th graders...

Friday I hosted the Middle School Writing Conference at MU.  I was surrounded by words and passionate drafting all day.  The next day a friend, and parent of a participant, messaged me wondering what writing she has been missing from me lately.  The sad truth was absolutely nothing.  I haven't been writing at all. It made me think of one of my favorite lines from the Prophet, "We speak when our minds cease to be at ease."  Maybe the same is partially true of writing.  This year I have had a contentedness in teaching and therefore parenting and marriage that has been absent for some time.  No one wants to read about how great someone's life is (and the parts that aren't great are the mundane we all experience).  All good stories require a good conflict.  Anything I wrote about teaching would just feel like bragging.  I have felt compelled to draft but the well has been dry content wise. After my friend's message, I told myself I would not go to bed Sunday until I had written something.  It seemed only fitting to force myself to engage in the writing activity I asked the writing conference kids to complete on Friday.  Likewise, it only seemed fitting to make them the subject.  This lesson is inspired by Ellen Wilson who was inspired by Ian Frazier's Crazy Horse which can be found below my original writing:

6^th Graders

Personally, I love 6^th graders, because they want more than anything to be seen and be loved; because even after being told countless times that life isn’t fair, they still have the audacity to believe that it should be; because it makes them happy to bring you chocolate covered strawberries, cookies made by their grandmas, and sea turtle pens from the Grand Cayman Islands; because they still lose their baby teeth, because when they lose these teeth in class or at camp they sometimes collect them in little treasure boxes and bring them home to show mom or dad; because it’s really hard to be mad at someone who is young enough to loose baby teeth; because even though they want to giggle and gossip about boyfriends and girlfriends they also sometimes bring bath toys to school and ask to play miniature basketball in your class before school in the morning, because when you accidentally refer to their future as ‘real life’ they look at you with the perfect blend of sarcasm and wisdom and say, “Oh – and I thought this was real life.”; because when you lose your patience with one of the tougher boys in one of your tougher classes they are willing to raise their hand and say, “You are always telling us to be kind, but what you just said wasn’t really kind”;  because they love their parents and families fiercely and want you to know everything you can about them; because they sometimes come to you frustrated with their parents and want you to coach them through how to have a hard grown up conversation when they get home; because ultimately they are often too scared to have those hard grown up conversations, but they can recognize why things would be better if they could; because if they can tell you genuinely know them and care about them, they will do just about anything for you; because if you find a book that speaks to their soul they will start to trust you with their heart;  because they can clean your room faster than the entire crew of Hoarders for the promise of a Jolly Rancher; because even the boys still cry at school sometimes; because when you say some of your mantras in passing like, “if you own who you are others will accept you too” or “we have to love people because they are flawed not in spite of their flaws” you notice some of them scribbling these words of wisdom in the margins of notebooks; because they make you feel important; because they still find life beautiful and exciting and shocking and scary and full of promise; because they have only walked this Earth for eleven or twelve years; because they survive daily among all of us who forget what it is like to have only walked this Earth for eleven or twelve years.  Sixth graders are delightful, exhausting, expectant, and impressionable preteens in the throes of the one of most accelerated developmental stages of their life.  If you pause you can make a mark, and in turn, be forever changed by them. 

Inspired by Crazy Horse by Ian Frazier

Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was; because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn't know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn't end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met the President; because he never rode on a train, slept in a boardinghouse, ate at a table; because he never wore a medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe before going to where he expected to die; because although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes referred to Red Cloud as "red" and Spotted Tail as "spot," they never used a diminutive for him; because, deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena which our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists; because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate. Crazy Horse was a slim man of medium height with brown hair hanging below his waist and a scar above his lip. Now, in the mind of each person who imagines him, he looks different.

From In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction edited by Mary Paumier and Judith Kitchen Jones