Shipwrecked

One of the highlights of my year at work is the Burch trip. We take the entire ninth grade out for a 5-day backpacking experience on the Appalachian Trail, led by instructors from Outward Bound. I love watching our students tackle the challenges they face on the trail and experience an environment completely unlike what many of them are used to. One faculty member accompanies each group of 10-12 students, and the experience has been completely different with the different groups of kids I have accompanied. Some years I am very impressed by them, and other years I am disappointed. Even in the disappointing years, though, there are always a few kids that stand out from the group as exceptional.

The Outward Bound instructors are very good at challenging the group just beyond their comfort zones. They have a huge bag of tricks from which to draw and adjust their plan on the fly as they learn what the current group can handle. So far, my favorite challenge they've given the group is the Shipwreck. We roped off a small part of the campsite and told the group that their ship had capsized. As they swam to the closest island, they were only able to grab three bags of gear. We set out the gear in bags for them to choose before we started. The groups of 10 chose a bag with three sleeping bags, another with a single headlamp so that they could see to use the bathroom during the night, and the "mystery bag". If they had chosen dinner, they would have also had to choose the stove to cook it, so they correctly assumed the mystery bag had food that didn't need cooking in it. The group all agreed at the end of the trip that shipwreck was the best night of the trip, as they had to really work together to get through the night.

Why am I thinking about this right now? The kids are out on Burch right now. I wasn't able to go this year because I committed our family to hosting an exchange student this week instead, but I can't help but think about the trip this week. Tonight I am thinking about the shipwreck. If some calamity happened to my home, what would be the three things I would grab on my way out of the house? The true answer is too easy. I would get my family out. Really - what else matters? But that answer is too easy, so let's make a "no living things" rule. If some calamity happened to your home and you could only grab three things on the way out, with everything else sure to be destroyed, what three things would you grab (other than living things)? It's a tough question, and one that can definitely induce some guilt. Once you choose your three, look back at them and think about what that says about you.

What are my three? Even as I type this, I'm not sure. I'll give it a try, though. This is just a rough draft.

1) My laptop. So much is on my laptop - everything that has to do with my work, all of my photos, a lot of my day-to-day entertainment. It seems like a minor thing, but computers really have become the link between the individual and the world.

2) My dad's picture. I only have one (he died over 30 years ago), and right now it's not even on the wall because it recently fell and the frame broke and I haven't gotten around to replacing the frame, but I think I'd want that one momento.

3) As much as I could possibly grab related to the piano. If I could get the piano itself out, I would. If not, I would grab an armload of sheet music, assuming that I could use pianos in the practice rooms at school. The piano is the easiest way for me to tap into and express whatever emotions I've been bottling up inside, and I think if I had some kind of calamity in which I lost all but three things I owned, I would need that outlet to get me through.

Once you put those three things in writing, you have to start thinking about what you left out. The one glaring omission seems to be anything family-related. I haven't rescued my kids' baby books or the cake topper from our wedding (which we still proudly display). Since the assumption at the beginning was that living things were safe, I hope it is not too damning that I did not rescue any of those things. We should still have plenty of years to create new memories.

What are your three? Do you see a theme? Are they all work-related? Family-related? Selfish (like mine)? What does that mean? Are you brave enough to respond with your three things in the comments section below? With what should I replace one of the items on my list of three?

What could possibly be next?

Before you commit any time to reading this blog entry, let me warn you that this one is a downer. If you're not up for that right now, then move on to something else. I've said before that this blog is a good place to put down my conflicting thoughts to help myself sort through them, and this is one of those cases. I've been complaining for the past couple of days about how awful they have been and all the terrible things that keep happening, and then tonight I got hit by a massive dose of perspective.

First, the backstory. This weekend was originally going to be a triumphant weekend for Deb and I as we were going to complete our first century ride together. For the non-cyclists out there, a century ride is a 100-mile organized group ride. Deb has been battling a foot injury all fall, which has hopefully been diagnosed correctly for the first time this week, but she had to drop out of the ride weeks ago. Instead I left Saturday afternoon to drive out to the town where the ride started Sunday morning to do my first century on my own. As I left campus, I noticed a group of kids playing together in the front fields - a pretty standard EHS sight and one of the big reasons we live here. While at dinner in Front Royal, VA, I get a call from Deb telling me how Mark had gone out to play with those kids right after I left and had ended up falling awkwardly on his hand and injuring it. She took him the the school doctor/next-door neighbor who showed her how to splint it and told her to call our doctor in the morning. By morning it was so swollen that Deb took him to the ER to get it x-rayed. Luckily it's a bad sprain, not a break, but he's in a pretty serious splint for a while. At every rest stop on the bike ride, I checked in to see what progress had been made in his diagnosis. So at this point, we have Deb out with an injured foot and Mark in a splint with an injured hand.

I, at least, had a terrific bike ride. The weather was cool and comfortable and the tomato sandwiches were delicious. Around mile 80 I started thinking about what I wanted to post as my triumphant post-ride Facebook status. By mile 85 I had settled on a picture of my cyclocomputer showing the >100 mile distance with a caption of "Take THAT, bucket list!" At mile 86.2, I hear a pop, and then a metallic clank-clank-clank-clank. I immediately hit my brakes to see what happened and the guy who had been drafting off of me rode by yelling, "Broken spoke!" Yep - with less than 14 miles to go, I had broken a spoke. I knew there was a mechanic stationed at mile 91.8, so I used one of the twist ties attaching my number to my bike to MacGyver a temporary fix and rode on cautiously. The mechanic told me I had the choice of stopping there and paying a few dollars to replace the spoke later, or finish the ride on my crippled bike and then spend a few hundred dollars replacing the wheel. So, my first century ride ended after 92 miles, and I got a ride in a car back to the finish.

So now we have injuries to Deb, Mark, Josephine (my bike), and my ego. I spent all of Monday grumpy. I ended my soccer practice early that afternoon so that I could get home and go help coach Mark's first soccer practice (which he would be watching from the sideline). I get home at 5:45. Deb has planned a party at 6:00 in honor of the German exchange student we are currently hosting. Strangely enough, Deb is not there. I find my 13-year-old daughter, Layne, in the kitchen preparing for the party. She is in the middle of making sandwiches and in a very calm state of near-panic (yes, that made sense in my mind) as she tries to get the entire party ready in 15 minutes. I ask how I can help, and she puts me to work. Soon one of her friends arrives, and Layne puts her to work too. The one bright spot in this whole weekend was watching Layne take charge. She really has the kind of leadership skills I don't have. She stayed calm, prioritized the work, delegated responsibilities to others, trusted them to do their jobs well, and got things done efficiently. In those 15 minutes, she made enough sandwiches to feed the guests, prepared decorative serving bowls of finger foods and snacks, and even prepared an apple pie and got it baking in the oven. This just confirms two things I keep saying on this blog - Teenagers are Awesome! and My Daughter is One of My Favorite People in the World! In the end, the party started at 6:00 and Deb got home at 6:15. Such is DC traffic! Because of Layne, though, the party was a success. I, personally, was ridiculously stressed out by the whole situation, but Layne took it in stride and just got the job done.

So, with all this going on, I am of course responding in the most mature of all possible ways - by whining on my Facebook status. An old friend from high school posts a response which helps me think about perspective - that there are millions of people out there with real problems who would dream of having the problems I have. Still today, though, I find myself whining about all the problems of the last few days. Then tonight, the phone rang and perspective was on the other end of the line. The mother of one of my advisee's was calling to let me know that the older brother of a friend of his had been found dead in his college dorm room this afternoon. She wanted me to know so that I could check up on her son/my advisee as he handled this news. Long story short - he and his classmates who knew the boy are handling it very well. They are shaken but doing a very good job of supporting each other. Have I mentioned lately that Teenagers are Awesome! Now that I've checked in on them, I get to start trying to process the news myself.

I have to be very careful what I say here because there are so many privacy laws (and there should be!) and I know more than I should say in public. The best I can say here is that I had a strange special bond with the boy who died today. I can't say why, but I definitely felt that bond. It's interesting the kids that you really feel connected to over the years, like the one I mentioned in my 9/11 post. This was a very different bond, but one that actually meant more to me than I realized. Because of that bond, this boy's death is a real failure for me. It is part of a doctor's training to deal with the fact that she can't save every life - some patients will die. Similarly, teachers know that they can't turn every student into the kind of mature, healthy adult who loves our subject best that we want them to be. Death isn't supposed to be part of the picture, though. We don't deal with those kinds of things. This is a case, though, where I can't help wondering if we couldn't have done more.

In the end, I have to look at the events of the last few days with a healthy perspective, but that's hard to do until you can find a little bit of emotional detachment. I've been complaining about traffic and broken bike spokes while at the same time kids have been dying. Perspective works both ways, though. While it helps me to realize how minor my problems have been and how great my life is, it also cushions me and protects me from the pain of the bigger problems. While I can't help but wonder if we could have done more to help this young man, I need to realize that his problems were beyond what we could handle. We did everything we could to help, and I know many others did too, but in the end, it just wasn't possible to do enough. This student's death was a tragedy and there is nobody to blame. As much as those of us who live comfortable lives in affluent nations like to think we are in control, in the end we aren't. Some things are too big for us to control or avoid. We just need to keep doing the best we can and helping each other through this life. There will always be tragedies, but there is so much more beauty and good in the world. We can't stop working to avoid the tragedies as best we can, but we also can't lose perspective.

I think I'll go watch my son sleep for a few minutes before I go to bed.

Remembering...

Somehow I feel like I have to post a 9/11 blog today, even though I am only an occasional blogger. This has been a strange day in several ways. I'm never sure what is the best way to honor the innocent people who lost their lives to terrorists, and a big part of me thinks the best way is to go about our lives just like normal. Terrorism is all about fear. As awful as the loss of nearly 3000 lives at once was 10 years ago, that is a drop in the bucket in terms of the US population. Terrorism is not about defeating us, it is about causing fear. In a lot of ways, today was a completely unremarkable day. We slept in a little bit, went for a bike ride to visit Art on the Avenue (or whatever it is called), had leftovers for lunch, enjoyed dinner at an outdoor table at Guapo's, and canned 12 pints of ridiculously tasty apple pie filling that we can pull out throughout the winter whenever we want a typically American treat. 

I think back 10 years to the day the terrorists struck. I was a new teacher at Episcopal. Some of the details are cloudy, but I remember my students coming into class talking about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. We turned on the TV in the classroom to see what was going on, and ended up watching the second tower struck live on TV. We were all stunned, but still naively in denial. At the end of that class I had a free period, and by then the reality was setting in. The Pentagon had been hit, and in some parts of the campus you could see the smoke rising. Because I was free that period, I was assigned a student whose father could have been affected. I am still impressed with how quickly Episcopal identified the students who might have parents in jeopardy. My student's father worked for one of the three big networks' news agencies in the Pentagon, so he was understandably not answering his phone. Normally he worked in the part of the building that was directly his by the plane, but fortunately, with the renovations they were doing, he was not there at the time. We were finally able to get in touch with him and assure the student that his father was okay. I think that was more of a relief to me than to him, because he still had enough 14-year-old "my dad is invincible" attitude to reach a healthy level of denial. Over the next few years before this student graduated from Episcopal, we developed a very good, although maybe quirky, relationship. We are currently Facebook friends and I love watching what he is doing now that he is fully an adult by any measure. He is already a far better man than I will ever be, and although he probably does not even remember that day the way I do, it will always mean a lot to me that we have that extra connection from 9/11/01.

What did I do today to commemorate 9/11/01? Pretty much nothing, and I can't think of a better tribute to the people who put their lives on the line every day to make sure that I can do just that! I owe a huge thank you to the police officers, fire fighters, and members of the armed forces who have devoted all or even a part of their lives to protect my freedom and safety, not just because they did so on 9/11/01, but because they do so every day of every year. For them, there was nothing special about that day - they just happened to be on duty. That is what makes ALL of them so courageous and heroic.

The Danger of a Single Story

In one of our faculty orientation meetings this week, we watched the beginning of a TEDTalk that I just finished watching, called The Danger of a Single Story.

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

Nothing I could say to summarize Adichie's talk could come close to the charm and power with which she presented it, but the basic idea is that we have to guard against forming opinions and understandings based on a "single story". She talks about her roommate in college who could not fathom her experience as a basically middle class Nigerian, because her roommate had only a single story about Africa - one of extreme poverty and disease. She confessed to times when she herself was embarrassed by her own ability to believe a single story. Her words are definitely powerful.

As a teacher, I always need to be on guard for the single story. Students get reputations, and too often teachers walk into the classroom on the first day of school already having formed opinions about a number of kids in the class, based on the single story they have heard from a colleague. With our international student body, it is also very easy to make assumptions in a similar way. I teach advanced math classes. When I see a Korean student on my class list, I am often too quick to assume that this will be a driven kid for whom grades matter more than anything else. I have taught enough Korean students over the years to know that they are just as much individuals as all students are.

Adichie makes another point that really struck me while listening to the talk. When trying to understand somebody's story, we must start from the beginning. She gives multiple examples of how changing the starting point can change an entire story, such as starting with Native Americans firing arrows at settlers rather than starting with Europeans invading land that native tribes had inhabited for years. The same is true of our students. Especially in a boarding school where kids come from all over and we know very little of their pasts, teachers have a tendency to start our stories of students with the first day of school. It is impossible to truly understand what motivates that student without learning the 15 years of stories that came before. Obviously it is impossible to learn all of that about all of the students I work with, but it is critical that SOMEBODY does learn all of that about each student. Every student must feel that connection and must feel valued as a complete individual.

Adichie's talk made me think about the many advantages of boarding school and why I love this overwhelming life. When I taught day school, students WERE single stories for me. I saw them only in the classroom and as academic beings. I definitely tried to connect with them and see more than that single story, but when it came down to my official interaction with them, it was limited. In the boarding school environment, it is almost impossible to see a student as a single story. I teach them in the classroom, coach them on the soccer field, work with them on dorm, run into them while they're hanging out with their boyfriend or girlfriend on the weekend. I see them interact with my family and with the families of their classmates. I see how they choose to decorate their rooms and what music they listen to. I see them laugh, fight, celebrate, cry, and sometimes even mourn. Teenagers are the most complex of all of us, because they have SO many stories intersecting in their lives and they are trying so hard to figure out which ones to adopt as their own and how to begin writing novel stories of their own. As adults, we've usually settled into a few comfortable stories which give us rich and rewarding lives, but teenagers are still trying things out. No job could be more challenging or exciting than trying to help them do just that. As boarding school teachers, we are certainly teaching our academic subjects and trying to create new mathematicians, or scientists, or linguists, but most importantly, we are helping these amazing young people understand the stories that have brought them to this point, and helping them to become the authors of their own lives. I can't wait to get started again on Tuesday!