Dead Fields

At first glance, it looks like death. Grayish brown, still, parched, rustling.
If stepped on, it might crunch, crumble, and blow away.   
It's 100 varieties of brown and 3 shades of brownish green lingering through.
Scarred. Mottled with marks of existence.

The display of desolation would present perfectly if not for the  stubborn spurts of life.
We originated from migration, dust, from poverty clashed with ingenuity - sparking hope.
We grew up with dust in our eyes, wind parching our lips.  Particles of studies settling in our pores, the statistics of failure. 
And yet we stay. We grow under a demanding sun. We hope against popular odds.
We know that in a dead field there is unseen life.  We know that where there is nothing vitality can hide beneath the surface.
Dig in and churn, there is abundance, just add water. Delve deeper and fortune courses under the ugliest crust.

 

The spirit of our home reaches back to our founders. Reaches back to the assurance that despite all appearances, encountering nothing is a catalyst for success.

So we stay with dust filled lungs and souls because endurance, hope, and effort were our founders.  Though it is brown, still and parched, we are the life that defies the first glance. 

Again.

Things happen too fast. I can already feel I've made a mistake. Try to recover. Move faster. I see the bar flying towards me. I latch on to it a split second too late. The loop is badly timed. Off rhythm, wrong momentum. The dismount is doomed, however there is nothing to do but follow through. Try to save it. Throw more power to my toes. I can't save it. THUD, slap! My entire body meets the floor in one solid contact. I can always hear the sound of my disastrous landing just slightly before the vibrations rattle through my teeth. In that split second, I wait as all of the air retreats from me.

Time always slows down and speeds up at the same time right after a mistake. The shouts of my coach start catching up from my ears to my brain, as if to make up for lost time, they swirl repeatedly, overlapping her current shouts, as I wait for my chest cavity to expand again. To allow air to return.

"....More power... ....faster.... ankles together... snap feet... ... straight legs!" She glances me over for obvious injury and then barks: "Again!"

For most of my childhood, I was in gymnastics. Looking back, I gained a great amount of life training through the years of gymnastics training.

Recently, what remains loudest in my mind is the constant memory of failing as I crashed against the mat, having to get up and do some sort of penitence in the form of conditioning, and then attempting the same task again. It may sound awful for this to be a vivid childhood memory, but it really isn't. It is actually an empowering memory.
 

The uneven bars terrified me. And thrilled me. I was afraid of heights even at the beginning. I remember crying in terror the first time my coach told me to jump from one bar to the other. I remember crying the second time, too. And then, I remember overcoming that insurmountable objective. Breaking past a mental barrier with physical achievement. Shortly after the first terrifying success, the uneven bars became my favorite event, even though it still often terrified me. The more terrifying the risk, the more satisfying the success. With the right skills, I could fly. The flying is not what resonates most with me right now, though.

This month, what resonates loudest with me is smacking down against that thick, blue gym mat. The endless hours of blistered hands, and exhausted breathing, tingling fingers, flying, flailing, falling, waiting for the air to enter the lungs again, and the shout, "Again!" Ripped blisters, limbs scuffed red, chalked hands, deep breaths, pensive stares at the blasted uneven bars, recitation of errors and corrections, repeat task, crash! Again!...and Again! And again.

True, in gymnastics, I learned how to fly, but what turned out to be more useful than learning a "long hang kip" was learning how to fail. What I learned was that I could withstand pain I had never previously imagined, I could overcome exhaustion that seemed overwhelming, I could eventually rise up from every painful landing.The best lesson I carried away with me was: Again. Even after I so badly wanted to quit and go home, I could not accept defeat.

There, as a 9 year old, I developed an intuitive understanding about grown-up life. Sometimes when you miss your grasp, move too slowly, lack the strength, sometimes even though you tremble with exhaustion, your blisters have ripped out, when things are continually crashing to the ground, and when feel you can no longer breathe, you have to listen to the insistent shout, "Again!"  You have to get up. You have to do it again and do it better. The only other alternative is to quit, exhausted, injured, frustrated, and sore with nothing to show for it all.

And so, during those times in adult life, while I sit with my head in my hands, sore, exhausted, feeling as if the air is being knocked out of me, my mind drifts back to sinking into that blue gym mat again and again, ripped up, waiting for the air to come back, because it will come back, mustering strength to get up and hearing the distant shout, "Again!" Except, now I'm the only one in the room.

The shout comes from within, "Again!"And so up I get, to try it again, and try it better, because defeat is not an option in life.

And once I've learned these acrobatics, I'll move onto harder ones, because, like gymnastics, that's kind of the point of life. It wouldn't be any fun without something challenging you to expand the brink of your ability.

And so with a huff and a limp, I draw a slow breath, pull myself up, eye the task that keeps knocking me down and mutter: Again.

Lessons Learned So Far: Teaching, Year 2, Entry 2

What a classroom looks like when you move classrooms entirely on a Thursday night. Blurry vision intentionally incorporated into photo.

39. Talk less. Designate the task, give the directions, assign the roles, and turn them loose. It works a lot better than lecture lessons.

40. Use fewer tones. Have a happy tone, have a directions tone, have a last warning tone, but leave the drama tones to the theater. Kids are easy panic triggers. If your tone becomes higher, faster and frustrated, you lose them to panic before the message is transferred. In discipline, keep the matter of fact tone, go lower, not higher, pace words evenly.

41. Blame the system. You don't have to do it because I say so, you need to do it because this is the way the classroom works, and I don't want to send you out, but if you break the classroom system, I have to... Suddenly, it's just the machine works of the classroom and school, no longer an evil teacher being mean and unreasonable. It never seems to phase them that the system you blame is the system you created...

42. Sometimes, clearly spelled out mercy works better than harsh punishments.

43. End the class every period by telling them to, "Get out... and have a good day!" and eventually, whenever they leave your classroom or presence, they'll make sure to wish you a good day before they leave every time. It's nice. Say it a minimum of 6 times a day, and get wished it a minimum of 100 times a day.

44. Students are entirely different people when in entirely different teachers' classrooms. 'Nuff sed.

45. Narrow in on one classroom management area at a time. If you feel you need to improve the class exit procedure, do that, but make that your baby. If you try to fix 7 different management issues, you'll be scattered and frustrated, and so will the students. If you focus harshly on training one item for a week, and then make a new focus next week, while maintaining last week, the students will learn what is expected better than trying to demand two new procedures at once.

46. The teacher needs as much classroom routine practice as the students do.  Making sure that the students push their chairs under the tables every time they get up takes as much out of you to remember to enforce regularly, as it does for them to remember to do it regularly. (Hence lesson #45)

47. Blame yourself. True, there are things that you cannot take credit for (Some kids will never study or do homework), however if the thing is, "This class just won't be quiet."or something of the like, blaming the students only gives you the excuse to quit trying, blaming the yourself makes you start looking for sources of the issue, and strategies that can curb the problem before is starts.

What happens when you listen to student ideas for the door decoration.

48. If a student in your class has good study habits, a strong understanding of how to behave appropriately in a classroom, how to talk to peers, how to treat teachers, or any sort of thing that would make a person want to say, "He's such a good student!" then you probably need to thank their teacher in the grade level before yours, because no person is naturally a good student, it's a vocation that must be taught. (Parents deserve a lot of credit too, but even "good parents" have kids who act out in a classroom because mommy's not looking right now)

49. Teach some of your students how to run your classroom technology! You never know when you're going to have sub whose highest technological skill is using a touch-tone phone, and will be completely incapable of running the slides you left for class, let alone be able to turn on a projector or unlock the computer when it falls asleep.

50. Hinging on #49, whenever possible, grab your squirreliest kid and throw him onto running the slides for the day, or queuing up the videos. He'll pay better attention, feel important and necessary, learn technology, and maybe actually remember what happened in class that day! (And, you'll know exactly when he's goofing off, because that's when the slides on the projector screen will start fritzing out... :-/ )

51. If you work on a subject for a really long time, so long that you as a teacher want to vomit if you have to hear or speak the word "inertia" again, and work on it in several different ways, making the students work the concept out in writing, lab practice, reasoning, discussions... you'll be relieved when the unit is over. The zinger is, you'll fall out of your seat in shock when 3 months later, you explain how satellites stay in orbit, and the students raise their hands and say, "Isn't that just using Newton's 1st law of motion?" Suddenly, hearing the word "inertia" will make you want to kiss someone.

52. Really, really, really invest in the classroom relationship. Own up to your mistakes when you make them, or they'll never stop holding them against you. Don't burn bridges by losing your cool. Don't insult the way a student is doing something, because then you have insulted the way their brains and hearts work, which is who they are.

53. Appeal to the ideal side of the student, even if you only see it every once in a while. Point out the good attributes that you catch sight of in them and tell them that's who they really are, because, at this stage in their life, they really have no clue who they are. Take advantage of their confusion and nudge them towards their best sides.

54. Let them cry. They do that. Especially during adolescent years. Acknowledge that they feel hurt. Expecting them to suck it up and soldier soullessly through their trials is unreasonable. Allowing them to take a moment to cry it out, and then jump back into life, lets them acknowledge the issue, and then acknowledge that there is life outside of that issue.

55. They know when you're just trying to pass the time. They sense when you're unprepared. They may never say anything (though often they will), but they know. Every time. You can see it in their eyes.

56. They can be really, really sweet and helpful. And that's nice. Even though, sometimes you'll spend an hour outside of class time trying to undo something they good spiritedly "helped" you with, the good spirit is still rewarding to see.

57. They break your heart. The thing that makes you reevaluate whether or not you can keep doing this vocation is not the piles of paperwork, hassles from coworkers, the long hours, the parents, the piles of homework, or the adolescent behavior... the thing that makes you really wonder if you can keep doing the job is the heartbreak. With over a hundred little souls, every day, laying claim to some small portion of your heart, the odds are high that a few of them will fall down so hard that they shatter that portion of heart that they were clinging to. Odds are at some point you will have to find some alone time to overcome the heartbreak.

The Letter: We.

I had a rough day today. I've had worse. But, my goodness, I have had so many better days, too.

This made picking up the mail and finding this envelope that much sweeter.

I have received correspondence from a combination of 5 Compassion students since 2008. That's a lot of letters! Off the top of my head, I can think of 3-4 letters that have truly threatened to make me cry for one reason or another. And it has been a while since those times.

So it surprised me, when I read through 9 year old Alex's brief letter-penned for him by his older brother-when my lower lip trembled a little at the end of it.

 

You see, Alex lives with his Grandmother and his 6 siblings in Haiti. He is the youngest, and every letter, one of his older siblings does the writing for him. 

So, for the first time in my Compassion experience, sponsorship has been an extremely strong family affair.

The rest of his letter is phrased, "He greets you"  "He thanks you" "He..."  He.

And then...

We love you so much.

We. 

All 8 of them.

 

That's a lot of love to feel rain down on a soul, especially at the end of a rough day.

 Especially from people I have never met. I don't even know what his family looks like.

I could tell you about all the good I can do for someone living in poverty, how easy and inexpensive  it is to help someone who needs it. I could tell you that you should consider reaching into someone else's life to help make it better.

But not today. 

Today, I am going to be selfish.

 Today, I am telling you about a little boy and his family, who wrote a letter to someone who needed it. About a little boy who reached into someone's else's life and helped make it better without even realizing it. A little boy whose Christmas money was spent on a pair of shoes, but could still afford to to improve my life.

Sponsorship shouldn't be about what I get out of it, 

but today I am going to share a little truth: 

sometimes they're the ones sponsoring me.

Today's smile was brought to you by "The Letter: We."

 

The Nativity.

I was in Target a few nights ago, picking up some last minute lab supplies for my students.

Having found my items, I wandered through the holiday supplies, just to see what was there.

As I paused to read a stocking stuffer label more closely, two women near my age conversed casually, and the topic caught my attention, so I pretended to read a while longer.

"You know those little holiday displays some people keep in their homes? Like, under the tree, or next to it? You know, the wooden ones. I think they are really cute. I was thinking I might want to get one this year..." Seeing her friend still wasn't following her topic yet, the woman went on, "They're, like, in a little barn, with an angel or a star over it."

I wanted to help, but then I would have to admit I had been listening.

"Well," The first woman continued, "I found one I like, it's really expensive, but I like it better because you can take the baby out of its cradle."

The women rounded to the next aisle, and I didn't feel like being creepy enough to find something to "read" on the next aisle, too. I needed to stop dawdling, anyway. I checked out.

I drove home, a little entertained by the description I had overheard.

Nativity. How strange that something dearer and more Christmas to me than Santa and the tree, something I played with during childhood was so novel, so unfamiliar to these women of a similar age. At first, I pondered the contradiction. They knew the scene, but not the story. It seemed absurd. I wanted to know what she thought the display represented.

Then, as I drove home, another thought struck me.

That was how it went the first time.

There was a cute baby, cradled by a manger, possibly in something like a little barn. What an odd display. And like the women that I shamelessly eavesdropped upon, most of the world didn't register the significance of the absurd little event.

The shepherds that were guided to the manger did not know to call it "The Nativity" either. They too sought out a savior that they didn't understand.

How did they describe the view they came upon?

It is tempting for those of us who know the story by heart to scoff at the obvious ignorance of the unindoctrinated about the nativity... We want to get caught up in our Christmas snobbery.

but wasn't that the point of the nativity?

Like these women in the store, there was an unnatural draw to this baby in a humbled situation.

Wasn't Jesus born for those who did not yet know him? The unindoctrinated, too?

Jesus pursued those who knew little, leaving the well studied to their own snobbery.

We like to focus really hard on a baby in a manger at Christmas time. Too hard, at times. I think it is because it is safe. What an innocent, nonthreatening picture: a sleeping baby. We want to focus on shiny stars, and pretty carols, hushed tones, and lullabies, cuddling, and cuteness. What an oversimplification of Christian life.

And perhaps, the woman at the store unknowingly tapped on some wisdom: We need a nativity display that allows us to take the baby out of the manger. Jesus doesn't belong in the manger.

There were many at the time who would have been perfectly happy to let that baby lie in the manger permanently. Unfortunately for them, the baby moved, escaped, grew up, overturned tax tables, talked to prostitutes, defended women, fed multitudes, provided wine for the party, demanded people walk on water, crawled willingly to his death, and rose effortlessly to come back for us. To put it shortly, he didn't stay cute and containable for long. The baby that left the manger set the bar for living faithfully much higher than crooning praises and gazing adoringly upon his sweet, sleeping face.

And maybe, sometimes, that's why we like to leave the baby in the barn.

When it comes right down to it, Christ didn't come to fulfill the ideologies built up by the deeply religious, those who knew all the stories. He didn't come to fulfill the ideologies of those who revere the glittery, shiny, fragile version of the Nativity. Christ was born in a humble place, to fulfill the longing of the unstudied, the aching, the unclean-those who could only describe him as "That baby in the barn." Those who dearly wanted to be able to take the baby out of the manger and hold him close.

That baby could have been born in a palace, or temple, in the Most Holy of Holies within the temple, had God willed the story to go that way. If he had, multitudes would have been happier with the story of the birth of the savior. God likes to crush our preformed ideas of "how it should go" because our ideas cannot compare, or even remotely encompass the amazing story that happens when God shows us how the story really goes.

Christmas was just the beginning of another chapter of God's fantastic story...and in the beginning of any story, no one really knows what is going on besides the author. We need to remember that it is alright for people not to understand. Just like the first Christmas, there were lots of people who didn't understand what the the fuss was about. And it's important that we don't shut people out or shoot them down, just because they don't have the all the Sunday school answers. Thankfully, God doesn't do that to us! Interest starts with curiosity, and curiosity has to be rewarded.

I'm glad I had to make that one more stop that night.

There were 3 things I needed to take with me out Target that night:

1. The reminder that it's okay for us to allow Christmas to be humble. More than just okay, it's beautiful.

2. Christmas would be worthless if the baby never left the manger, just like Easter wouldn't matter with the savior never left the cross, and it's important to think of Christmas as the beginning, rather than the focal point.

3. File folders. Good thing I needed those, because I never had the first two items on my shopping list.

Fortunate

"So, are you out the door at the clock today, or are you hanging around to get work done?"

My coworker asks at lunch the Friday before the school break finally arrives.

 

"Out the door!" I respond, "I have stuff to do!"

"Errands?"

"No, I'm headed to the coast."

"Niiice, the beach!"

"Meh, the beach may happen, but I'm not much for the beach. I told my Grandad I'd visit, and they just happen to live near the beach."

A pause happens. 

I expect to hear something about how cute or quaint it is that I would use vacation time to visit grandparents.

 The pause extends long enough to become thoughtful.

"You're fortunate, you know."

The normally jocular tone has turned completely pensive, 

"Not too many adults still get to visit their grandparents."

 And now it's my turn to take a pensive pause.

It doesn't feel right to go into great detail for my coworker about how fortunate is too brief of a statement.

 Sometimes I get busy, and distracted from this fortune. Even during the times I am careless though, I am still greatly blessed.

But it's nice to be reminded of what I am.

So I nod.

"Yes, very fortunate."

Balance.

When I was in high school, my youth pastor drew a diagram. It was a bulls eye. Relationships are arranged like the target symbol.

The center of the target, the bulls eye, is where you are. It's a tight spot, not a lot of room for many others. The next ring would be your close friends and family. It's still a smaller space, but it can fit a few more people. These are the few who you trust with your most precious cargo and your most morbid confessions. The next ring are your fun friends, the ones who are great to be around, you spend time with them, but you wouldn't necessarily ask them to help you with something too personal, or share too much with them, but it's a larger number of people. These rings go all the way out to acquaintances. His point was, not everyone you know can be on the same level of friendship. There is just not enough room or time to make that work, and it's okay to have the few who you trust more than others. In fact, it is wise. You would not want some of those acquaintances on the outside ring sitting by your side during nerve wracking doctor's appointments or other such sensitive moments. 

Balance.

This simile obviously made sense to me, as it still crosses my mind over 10 years after the illustration.

It was perhaps the first time that I considered balance in life without connecting that balance to equal shares. It was probably the crack in the icy shell that had shielded me from the revelation of balance of time within life.


A few years later, this concept grew again for me. I was spending all of my time studying, attending labs and classes, taking field trips, and studying for tests. I was driving myself insane. I was isolating myself, and sinking into depression because of it. Finally, on a whim of a breaking point, I looked at my textbooks one Sunday morning and said, "I'm done." For the rest of my undergrad career, I did not do school stress on Sundays. Balance. I realized, as long as I allowed it to happen, all of my days would be consumed by stress and fret. Deciding on one day that was off limits meant that I had to make better use of the time that was not off limits, work harder on Saturdays, and in between classes on weekdays. It meant no longer having to face "study guilt" on Sundays when I failed to get around to studying, because I no longer had any intention of studying. It meant peace. Reviewing priorities. Liking myself. Enjoying life. It meant balance.

Through the years I have worked in different areas. As an adult out of school, work is addicting. It is a place with structure and ritual, much like school once was. It can eat a person alive. It tried to eat me alive. In each new environment, I again had to relearn to set boundaries that created balance. It's okay to take overtime, but there has to be a limit. There is no shame in saying no when that early morning phone call comes. Balance. It means deciding to make better lunch decisions a few times a week so as to not be physically torn down. It means learning which conversations to take part in and which ones to fall silent in, to prevent from being emotionally torn down. It means remembering that there are relationships in my life that are more important than the ones I try to establish with my colleagues, and that just because I am socially worn out from working with people all day does not mean that my need for meaningful social time with the real relationships in my life has been met. It means actively insuring that I don't get so distracted and filled up by work fluff, that I forget to lay the foundations of life. Making sure I don't attend the company Christmas party and then forget to actually celebrate Christmas with those I love. It means instigating balance, sometimes by force.

And now, stepping into a career, I find a new level of balance must be learned. In a job, I can clock out and go home, leave the issues next to the clock and pick them up on my way back in. In a career, I have a harder time finding the border between home and work. In a job, if you get fired, you move on to the next job and learn a new skill set. In a career, you have laid down so much official training, that to moving to another career would require pausing for more education before being able to apply to be a rookie in another field. When I worked jobs, there was never any point in time that I found cause to stay behind unpaid and work a little longer. In a career, it comes down to my reputation, which has often mean staying 3-5 hours late on a regular basis to make sure everything runs smoothly every day.  Combine that with having been in school last year, and I can easily admit: there was no balance last year, only survival.

So here I am, learning a new level of balance. It makes sense to me. In school, with every grade, in gymnastics, with every level, in karate, with every belt, in band, with every music piece mastered, there was always another challenge to overtake, another improvement to make. It is the same thing with learning to apply balance to life, there is always a new level to learn. Whether it is balance within family, school, friendships, activities, finances, jobs, careers, every new situation requires new balancing skills.

This year, I am actively focusing on some areas to improve my balance. I want to read books for fun again. Leave work before the sun sets more often. Go for walks and bike rides. Spend time with people who will still care about me in a couple of years. Write more often. Take naps with my cat. Take better care of my garden. Travel more. Eat better. Play a lot more games, and crack a lot more jokes around kitchen tables. I want to intentionally invest in the parts of my life that matter most to me.

This year, I want to balance better.

The time change is today. You have an extra hour. How's your balance?