school

Treasures in the Haystack

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Today as I was walking down the hall, I noticed a small group of first years huddled in a little cluster not far from a grove of tree-like seniors.  The freshmen looked so young and innocent and small compared to the sturdy and confident older students.  I realized that it was only partly about their respective heights; it was also about their carriage and body language.  The blooming from childhood to young adulthood really seems to happen in these few years that they walk the halls of high school.  I also realized that those particular freshmen, who seemed so small in comparison to the seniors, were actually all taller than I am.  Heh.

I should be grading.  I have a big stack of essays that really need to be done by tomorrow.  But my gratitude list today is sort of centered around that stack.

Gratitude List:
1.  All these stories.  Perhaps it’s a little brutal, a little brusque, to ask these young folks whom I don’t really know to write essays for me, describing something that brought about a change in their lives.  Oh, how tender, how vulnerable, their responses.  I hold them like eggs, like butterfly wings, like whispers.  Tales of joyful tears at the birth of a niece or a nephew, of tenderly nurturing small creatures, of leaving their homes to travel to the US to study, of deciding to care about their futures and their dreams.  Oh, the stacks of grading can be a teacher’s bane, like mythological challenges to be overcome, but they hold such treasures.  Such powerful and fragile treasures.  Have I said how in love I am with these people who fill my days?
2.  How a little bit of unplanned time in the classroom can sometimes turn into powerful discussion time.  Yesterday, it was about how, when you stand up against something wrong, it makes it easier for the next person to do so.  Today, it was parenting techniques, and helping children to develop intrinsic motivations to choose the “right” option instead of forcing them to follow the extrinsic motivation of threats of parental punishment.  Really.  These are wise and thoughtful folks.
3.  Monarchs on the move.  I keep seeing them–it’s migration time.
4.  Wild geese.  The ones that fly overhead.  The ones in Mary Oliver’s poem.  The ones in Mary Black’s song.  The one some call the Spirit.
5.  Tomorrow we go to the beach.  The farm work will go on here without us.  The school work will get done in the cracks and spaces.  And I will have a day and a half to breathe seas air and refresh and rejuvenate.  Blessed be.

May we walk in Beauty.

World Environment Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today is World Environment Day, declared by the United Nations Environmental Program.  What will you do today, tomorrow, next week, to pr0tect the environment?  Walk in the woods with a child and listen for the birds, plant a tree or a garden, refuse to buy that over-packaged thing that you really don’t need, don’t make that extra car trip to town, read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, open new doors in your heart and your brain for possibilities.

We owe it to ourselves and to the next generation
to conserve the environment
so that we can bequeath our children
a sustainable world that benefits all.

–Wangari Maathai

Gratitude List:
1. Schemes and dreams
2. Rain and more rain
3. Surprise and awe
4. The poplar and the sycamore
5. The penultimate day of school

May we walk in Beauty!

In the Hall of the Old School

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Yesterday I visited the school where I will be teaching, the school I graduated from 29 years ago.  So much is new and different.  So much is the same.  The mural of the hand holding the rainbow still brightens the stairwell (may it always be there).  The old wing still looks much like it did in my day, and it smells exactly the same as it did when I was there.  We opened the door to the classroom where I will be teaching, and one of my own teachers walked out and hugged me.  Did I dream this?  I can hardly believe this is happening.  I used to imagine it, twenty years or so ago, and here it is.

I do have recurring anxiety dreams that take place in a school.  I am trying to find the classes where I am supposed to be either studying or teaching.  I’ll spend the entire dream trying to find where I am supposed to go, going up stairs and through labyrinthine hallways.  I’m always late, sometimes at the end of a semester and realizing that I have forgotten to go to class.  Or I’ll be going to teach the first day of a class and realize that I have forgotten to get a schedule to know when and where it is.  Once, when I was teaching at Butler County Community College, I dreamed that I rushed in late to class only to see my dean teaching the class.  She said since I was always late, she’d decided to take over my schedule.  The thing I realized yesterday about it all was that the setting of the dream is always very similar to my high school alma mater.

In the past ten years, since I have taken a break from teaching, the frequency of those particular anxiety dreams has lessened.  Now that I am teaching again, I wonder if they will increase in frequency again.  And how will it be if the real setting is now overlaid on the dream setting?  And now that the reality has begun to feel so intensely like a happy dream?

Here is little poem that has nothing to do with high school or anxiety dreams:

You must have heard me prescribe hens
for a low self-opinion.
There is nothing like a little chicken worship
to make a body feel like a rock star.

But here’s the thing–
my chickens think that you
are a capital rock star, too.
“Look!” they told me this morning
when I looked in on them.
And I knew exactly
what they meant.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Love is the Answer.  Love is the Answer.  Love is the Answer.
2. That moment when we opened the door to my new classroom, and my own teacher walked out and hugged me.
3. Creating and envisioning new spaces
4. I am going to a book sale today!  I love book sales.
5. Going to vote with the kids.  As cynical as I get about whether this democratic ideal actually has any value in the oligarchy, I want my children to learn and experience the ideal with the hope that one day we will have a truer democracy, disentangled from wealth and corporate influence.  And we stopped at Turkey Hill and bought ice cream on the way home.

May we walk in Love!

Sunshine Mandala and an Egg of a Moon

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2013 August 299

Gratitude List:
1.  An orange egg of moon resting on the rim of the bowl of hills above us.
2.  Socializing.  Big one, this.  Someone else watched our children this evening so we could talk to adults.
3.  Sharing story.  Even when the story hurts.  It always helps to tell and hear.
4.  End of the first week of school.  Ellis says the thing he likes best about school is School.  Says he’s developing a Stay Ahead Strategy for keeping up with the class when they write things from the chalkboard because he writes more slowly than most of the others.  (“Did your teacher help you develop that strategy?”  “No, I came up with it myself” he said.  “In fact, just now is the first time I have called it that.”)
5.  We’re halfway through the season.  The light’s at the end of the tunnel.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love what we do.  But we get so very tired.  It the Wednesday of the season.  Energy is renewed simply by the awareness that we’ll get a break.  Some day.

May we walk in Beauty.

Good Stuff at the Bargain Bungalow

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  My new adjustable dress form.  Well, new to me.   Got it for a steal at The Bargain Bungalow.
2.  When I told Ellis that we were thinking that maybe he might go to school this fall, he said, “Yes, I think that would be a good idea.”  And he has bought himself a School Supplies cigar box (at The Bargain Bungalow), and has begun to talk about things he is going to tell his teacher.
3.  Four wonderful years with a charming small person who is growing into himself.  (And that I am not going into labor tonight as I did four years ago.)
4.  Ritual.  Group contemplation and meditation.
5.  Silence.  Waiting.  Stillness.

 

Nettles coming up.  Such a lovely violet on the tips.
2013 March 110