Three Semesters, 6 Quarters, Still a Sophomore

The conclusion of a faculty meeting around 11:45 A.M. yesterday marked the end of our First Semester, the school's Second Quarter, my third semester of teaching, and half-way point of my sophomore year of teaching.

It's some sort of milestone, I guess.

Things move along. There were some difficulties along the way, especially in the broader school. Children doing things they should not do in places they should not be; and the resulting office visits and murmuring by the lockers that fall mysteriously silent whenever a faculty member should appear. The Hurricane Days and the missing exams, the annoying meetings where the same issues are raised and addressed but never truly solved, the quizzes, the missing assignments, the game.

I mean the cultivation of minds in grace & truth, of course. But sometimes you need a timeout or half-time break. One of the many reasons Christ came when He did, as I understand it, was his divine concern for those of us in the Western Anglo countries who insist on a 9-month school cycle. For these He came to save, along with all the other fine natives who use different school schedules. (okay, enough Kiplingesquing for now! Take up ye burdens and move along!) But sometimes it feels like a game, and one just plays along until a surprise comes along and shocks one into remembering what is actually going on.

Learning, one hopes.

Amend: This wasn't meant to sound depressed; but I suppose that is what happens when there is very little one cares to say...

Looking Alive

School portraits arrived yesterday. Last year I looked...tired, and somewhat distant (my brother said stoned, which is obvious not true, because this isn't Colorado). I was surviving, but very well worn and tired—and that was only 5 weeks in!

This year I actually look alive, happy, and even vibrant (questionable word choice, I know). The students who suddenly yelled "SMILE MR. FULLER!" probably helped. Regardless I consider the picture a measure of progress. I will not be mounting it on  my living room, classroom, or bedroom wall, however. Seeing myself every morning in the mirror is enough trama for one day, and there isn't anyone who would want to have my picture anyway. Which is alright, as I cannot blame them.

This Friday is the end of the first quarter. Eighth grade is getting their first real taste of the upper school faculty, with four tests this week. I was going to make it a paper but decided the test was easier on them, not to mention easier for me to grade over the weekend. They'll have plenty of other opportunities, I'm sure. Overall they aren't as bright as last year's class, so I'm having to slow down, focus on routine and repetition, and in general treat them more like the eighth graders they are (and remember that the eighth graders I saw in May of last year had were a full year ahead of the eighth graders I started this year with. There is hope.).

A timeline is slowly going up in my room, I have been meaning to make one since my last observation but befuddled by placement and location. Three thousand years of history is a lot to spread on the walls, flowing around corners, beams, and pull-down projector screens. Hopefully it will all come together, though I will have to relocate my Medieval Maps & Art wall to make way for American History (cue the Constitution!).

In time, in time, school has such a funny sense of time--class periods come, pass, bell, laughter in the hall way, dismissal, grading, planning, cramming for exams, teaching class without a lesson plan, desperation to fit material in as more and more class days are whittled away by events and sports and Christmas concert rehearsals, school pictures...

Into the desk drawer the picture goes. Perhaps I should send it to Grandma.

Poetry Days

I decided today that I should start having a poem of the week. I already do several things to help vary the class routine: This Day in History, or This Day in Music as I've switched it to this year, Bow Tie Friday. Reading a poem aloud would be a nice change of pace, providing a solid moment of reflection and a celebration of the spoken word. And it has the added benefit of making me read more poetry..."though teaching, we learn," as Seneca said.

I haven't decided if it should accompany Bow Tie Friday or appear some other day of the week. Wednesday, a mid-week reminder in the midst of the stress of two more days of school! to pause and reflect? It isn't as if we don't have any regular observances of beauty at the school, each year students memorize a poem for the Fine Arts Festival and we started singing a Psalm or hymn every morning in the upper school to start our day.* Some of the rhetoric teachers also teach the students Psalm settings in their theology and literature classes. I don't have the musical credibility** to do that, but I'm good enough to find a poem!

Where and when to begin...

* Because everyone sounds great at 8 A.M. Considering warm ups in the car.
** You could probably read that comment as confidence; I would likely argue both.

The Leaves Fall for Thee!

This morning, when I woke up, I was cold. Not terribly chilled, but just enough to be aware that the temperate outside was below...say 65º F.

I checked the weather over my coffe...it was 57º F. Pansy. But considering the last three months have been one stream of clothes-are-only-really-necessary-because-of-social-conventions weather punctuated at times by rain, I felt it. The last few weeks I've been sleeping without the A/C unit going, but avoiding and fighting the heat during the day and early evening. This morning I put on a sweater, knowing that a high of 72º would be just enough to fool the school's ventilation system and make things chilly. And so they were, although by lunchtime I was throwing open the windows and letting a gloriously pleasant breeze throw papers all across my classroom.

Fall means several things, really:

• The death of Man's most ferocious and eternal enemy, the mosquito.
• The conclusion of the regular baseball season, which is a mercy for my last-place Rockies, who are really only fighting the Cubs for second-to-last place this year. But exciting for the Washington Nationals and even Baltimore Orioles, so there should be some local excitement. 
• Fall Beers, including the marvelous Sam Adams' Octoberfest and Shock-Top's surprisingly delicious Pumpkin Wheat (and and and oh never mind).
• Sweaters (and other modes of reusing dress shirts that are overdue for the cleaners). 
• Better pipe smoking weather.
• Pretty leaves, eventually.
• And the start of school, of course.

I remember in middle school playing a tune on the piano that involved the lines "the falling leaves / of red and gold." It was a nice, pretty song, and I always think of it when the colors start to change. Last year the change came very late in the season (global warming or something), but already I'm seeing a few hints of red overhanging the brick sidewalks of town. Town is absurdly picturesque in the fall--not Rocky Mountain aspens but very delightful in their own right.

School is now in week three, things have not started as well as I would like, but we've had some good days. The lessons left over from this time last year are rather...minimal and disorganized, if found at all, so there is a lot of prep work still to be done. I'm realizing how blessed I was with some of my classes last year--they were very tolerant of my fly-by-pants-almost-dead teaching that first month and still managed to learn things that the current classes struggle with when I'm organized and prepared. Kudos to you, current 11th grade, for putting up with me. You'll go far in life if you can handle that experience.

Fall does bring with it a peaceful assurance of change, that school actually has started and it is okay now, that the seasons and times of life role on. Each falling leaf sings a little tune, praising the summer for its blessings and rejoicing in the fall to earth. In time new leaves will take their place, new students, new lessons, even new places...but tonight, 50º F and lessons on Egyptian religion.

They did not wear sweaters in Egypt, alas.

The Venerable Bede

The Venerable Saint Bede. Or is it Bedé? Or Beade? Or some sort of half-slurred strange Anglicized form in-between? Truthfully I have never known, and only bothered to look it up after students inquired into my (frequently flawed) pronunciation. Wikipedia seems to suggest something more along the lines of "Beed," which J. (who happens to be studying linguistics, so she should probably be counted as good authority) confirmed this weekend.

The funny thing about starting the school year is that everyone has to adjust. Students, who have been living in the school-summer cycle for most of their lives, don’t remember how to open their lockers, which books go to which class, and that response sheet you assigned Wednesdays. Teachers forget who has lunch duty and the secret to making the copier print double-sided, and which period on Thursday they don’t have due to choir (or they have it earlier and aren’t prepared; and in-service doesn’t help). Parents have to be retrained in the proper procedures of the dismissal pick-up line, hopefully sparing innocent or inattentive pedestrians in the process. And everyone has to remember (likely several times) why again they are here, getting confused and angry and flustered and laughing at all the mistakes—for the sake of learning and growing.

Gradually everyone settles into place, and that is well. Two lessons even left me feeling quite pleased and satisfied at the end of the day, which has been a precious rare occurrence of good luck (not planning) in my short career. 

The first lesson was on the Code of Hammurabi in 8th grade, a group I’ve never had before and am struggling to place as new 8th graders and not the 8th graders I promoted to 9th last year. Stealing an idea from the Veritas Omnibus (something I intend to do with great frequency this year), students broke into groups and passed judgment on various hypothetically court cases from Biblical and Babylonian perspectives. Needless to say, the dear souls were delighted to administer absurd punishments to Sam for letting his goring bull Ferdinand roam free, and to Tom for trespassing on Sam’s land. Etc. And then they invented some rather harsh rules they would like to add to the school, including lunchroom lashes for failed exams and dismissal line pillories for repeat behavior offenders. Clearly Christian mercy is something we need to be cultivating this year.

The second lesson was on the Venerable Bede, who I don’t know near enough about. Veritas has students read the entire Ecclesiastical History of the English Speaking Peoples, which is a bit more than I can fit in my schedule, but something to keep in the back of my reading list. Since I assigned Geoffrey of Monmouth’s A History of the Kings of Britain as summer reading, I thought it would be fun to spend more time in the vast amounts of English history. But…I am neither an Anglophile (see the English Dept.) nor an expert in English history, so the unit will not be as successful as hoped. Maybe next year, next week we’ll move on to Byzantium and the glories of Constantinople.

Regardless, I liked the lesson (despite my poor reading selections) and spent a good deal of time discussing why Bede wrote church history rather than national history. Last year, when we studied the Medieval period, students started to complain about how much the church kept popping up. Their conception and awareness of the church as a force in daily living is very vague, something still separated in their minds as church on Sundays and Christians the rest of the week. Bede provides a helpful focus for the beginning of the school year—for him, everything is related to the Incarnation and the resulting history of God’s people. Christ is the center, in the spread of the Gospel and in Bede’s entire conception as history: before the Incarnation and Annus ab incarnatione Domini. Such should be the spirit of the Christian student.

For things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things. Choose, therefore, from every church those things that are pious, religious, and upright, and when you have, as it were, made them up into one body, let the minds of the English be accustomed thereto.  – Gregory the Great to Saint Augustine of Canterbury, I.XXVII 

Sophomore Year

Tomorrow I report to school at that ever unreasonable hour of 7:15 A.M. to greet...students.

Needless to say, emotions are mixed. I've had a wonderful summer, traveling and generally enjoying myself with friends and interesting people. For that I am very grateful, for both summer and time to rest. At the same time I thrive in the structure of school, with deadlines and patterns and repetition; without them I falter and piddle, bumble around all day half reading, half doing, half being. A poor excuse for existence, but one I find maddeningly difficult to avoid during four day layovers in Delaware.

Yet I dread the return, for I am not prepared. My principal remarked this week that she has been teaching for twenty years, and every year her friends ("bright conversationalists," she called them) ask "are you ready?" And the answer is always "no." More lessons to write, more children to deal with, new material to incorporate or change, new methods, ideas, rules...and yet always the same. It's a strange paradox.

Every teacher I have ever met says "the first year is always the worse." Doubtless their testimony is true, the confidence of knowing (even vaguely) what the coming year holds is strong medicine, perhaps to the point of overlooking the immediate for more long-term perspectives. Faculty in-service meetings are filled with talk of "change this" or "do that," character development, vision. These are key, especially in a classical Christian school whose membership finds it easy to get off track. All the talk is good; but when I come to teach tomorrow I suspect I shall find myself rather overshot, launching into a discourse of Medievalism or the unique American character well before I have done my first duty: caring for my students.

They are marvelous little people, they push and stretch me and have "ah ha" moments that make all the late nights and red ink justifiable. Some of my favorites have left, some will be problems; they will doubtless leave me scratching my head with awe or confusion. I saw the mother of one of my new 8th graders in the copy room the other day, and she remarked how C. was really looking forward to my Western Civ class. Normally one would be pleased, and reply with some remark about how much they were looking forward to having C. (a student of solid repute, let it be known) in their class. Instead I just stammered something about how glad I was he wasn't dreading it, as if education and learning were negative acts done in the heavy toil of suffering. May it not be so for him, or me. I'll be ready--for something.