I have added a few things: a calendar, an index and an easier way for you to comment or contact me.
The new school year is almost half over with, and it seems to be flying by. In addition to my duties as the English teacher at the ALC, I have helped negotiate the new contract for my local Northfield Education Association and worked on our Q Comp proposal that we put before the membership just before Christmas break. Even though we were unsuccessful in persuading the membership to go along with our plan, I believe in the effort we put forth, and am proud to have been a part of a reform effort that our association initiated.
I have been thinking a lot about these words by Reinhold Niebuhr:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.
Last November my good friend Burt Fleming nominated me as Northfield’s teacher of the year and my fellow teachers affirmed that nomination. Burt is someone who always sees the best in everyone, and it is a pleasure to work with him and to observe his work with the young people we serve in the community. This recognition is a great honor, and it sounds trite to say, but it is very humbling. Humbling because you are held up as an example of all the hard working and creative teachers in the Northfield schools and going forward to represent them in the state recognition.
One of the responsibilities as teacher of the year is creating a portfolio of thoughts and ideas about education, which brings me back to Niebuhr because he captures what I see in what it means to be a teacher. I was guided by this quote as I thought about what I wanted to say. To teach is to attempt to be more than we can be, and yet we can only be what we extend in the smallest way to everyone we encounter. It is difficult when we are focused on the daily routine of our plans for the day, the week, the term, the year – to see how our little world fits in to the larger scheme. Yet that is what we are about in everything we do – we are always laying out the future for the young people we guide. For a time we must envision the world for them so that they can see themselves in it.
Once standing on a mountaintop in China with my brother the clouds
closed us off from the world below and the universe above. We had come to China to find the birthplace of my father, which we got close to but could not touch. We had come to Hua Shan because our travel brochure said it was the site of the most beautiful sunrise in the world. The clouds hid our view but did not leave us feeling we had not been in a beautiful place. In the sunlight of the day we could see enough to imagine the birth of the sun on that day. Continually on our journey we learned to accept what the convergence of the elements and forces allowed us to experience and felt enriched by what was offered to us. We grew closer and the father we lost thirty years earlier became more real to us.
My grandparents on my father’s side were both teachers. I live in the house they purchased in the 1930s. I never met my grandfather and have only a few memories of my grandmother. Coming to visit this house always filled me with awe and mystery because there were so many different things in it from around the world. A Buddhist temple bell, a snarling dragon face, bison horns, objects carved from fish bone, water buffalo horn, jade and wood. My grandmother had reindeer fur slippers made by Laplanders and wallpaper with pictures of Chinese junks and Chinese milkmaids. My earliest memory of her involves her showing my brother and me a bat she had killed with a coat hanger because my mother screamed bloody murder when she saw it. She held it up by the wing tips and said, “This is a bat and you shouldn’t be afraid of it because they help us by eating the mosquitoes.†She encouraged us to touch it and explained: Sometimes they get trapped inside houses, and sometimes the only way to get rid of them was to kill them. Her hands were small and her thumb and fingers were crisscrossed with little black lines from cutting apples for the wonderful pies she made. Most of what I know about my grandmother I learned later when I grew up. But who she was for me is revealed in that memory of her showing us this creature, beautiful and necessary to her eye.
Both my grandparents were Norwegian Americans growing up on farms in Southwestern Minnesota. My grandfather came as an infant with his parents from Norway and my grandmother was second generation born here, her mother lived in to her nineties told us stories of hungry Dakota knocking on the door for food. My grandmother attended the state teachers college and returned home to teach her younger siblings and other farm children in a one-room schoolhouse. Then in 1915 went to China hoping to teach in a Christian school but served as a nanny until she married my grandfather.
Although they had taught school twenty miles from each other in Minnesota, they had to travel around the world to meet and marry. They were both hard working people of faith. Reading their diaries, I realize that just to have survived the hardships of their lives was heroic. War, pestilence, disease, uncertainty and continual loss made them hold more strongly to faith and to hope for a better future for their children. They instilled in their children a commitment to make the world better for those who would come after. Their oldest, a daughter, started a leprosy clinic for residents of a small island archipelago near Taiwan. Their second, a son, became a doctor researching a cure for cancer and became a college president. The next in line gave loyal service to his country in the Navy and became an engineer, always offering many hours of volunteer time. My father, the youngest, though not a teacher, shared many of his parents’ skills, having grown up in a home where every experience was viewed as a life lesson for tomorrow. As long as I can remember he was a Boy Scout leader. My grandparents had created an environment that still exists in my home today. A house full of books, an environment of curiosity and questioning open to the world outside and all the many experiences and ideas out there. I have benefited much from the world they served and left behind.
My grandfather implemented teacher training in China and encouraged teachers to test for results. He traveled on horse back and on foot from school to school. It is hard to imagine what his struggles must have been like, and sad to think they may not have had much if any impact. But he carried away with him knowledge and skills he used as teacher and administrator at St. Olaf College. He was forced to leave China in the midst of warlord activity after hiding in the basement of their home while battles raged out on the street. I read a harrowing account of my grandfather operating a railway handcar between the two encampments, bullets flying by his head as he tried to broker a ceasefire so he could get the three families hiding in his basement to safety and a train out of China. He returned to Minnesota more worldly and wise, having learned a great deal from the people he went to improve.
My grandparents were part of the Norwegian emigration that Ole Rolvaag described in his novels and that Thorstein Veblen observed in his writings about farmers and the country town. Perhaps my favorite Veblen idea appears in his work The Instinct of Workmanship, in which he argues against the classical economic idea that human beings are nothing more than a hedonistic mechanism motivated by carrots and sticks. Veblen wanted a definition of what a human being is that related to the small communities and immigrant farmers he saw around him, that might have existed for centuries in little villages all across Europe and in the burgeoning towns of middle America. He argued that what motivates us is first an instinct to preserve the species, which he calls the parental bent. He saw it as much more than procreation though. It is the inclination to create and support systems and traditions that sustain the society – a hope for the future. Second, he believed that human beings possess an instinct for idle curiosity, which is much like what Caltech Physicist Richard Feynman describes in his essay The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. We have a built-in curiosity about existence that drives our ever-growing collection of knowledge and understanding of systems and processes of nature around us – faith in the universe and what it has to offer. Finally, Veblen believes we possess an instinct for improving upon the things we do and create. It is about always looking for the better product and the better process for making it – attention to the objects and processes of our creation – because we can continually see ourselves as better than we are. When I shared this with a fellow teacher her response was, “Veblen’s instincts sound like what would describe a good teacher.”